"It seems very unlikely that Topolánek's government will last," says Ladislav Cabada, a political analyst at the University of West Bohemia in Plzeň, "But then again there have been so many twists and turns, so who knows. Nothing will surprise me anymore."

The ODS executive council unanimously supported Topolánek's proposed governing coalition at a Jan. 4 meeting, and Topolánek promised he would resign as party chairman if he fails to win a vote of confidence for it.

Regional ODS leaders have been calling for Topolánek to resign for a while. They're unhappy with their leader's inability to find a way out of a political logjam that is in its seventh month, after a general election last June left the Chamber of Deputies evenly divided between the left and the right.

Topolánek's party doesn't have enough Chamber seats to stand alone, so he formed a new coalition with the Green Party (SZ) and the Christian Democratic Union (KDU-ČSL).

These are the same parties he teamed up with last July, shortly after the election. But that coalition dissolved soon after, amid allegations from the SZ and KDU-ČSL that Topolánek was negotiating behind their backs with former Prime Minister and Social Democratic Chairman Jiří Paroubek.

Will the coalition last this time around? Analysts are skeptical. Most expect that Topolánek will resign as promised, once his Cabinet fails to win a vote of confidence.

"It seems that Topolánek's days might be over," says Alexandr Mitrofanov, political commentator for the daily Právo. "He's lost a lot of support within his own party."

If Topolánek fails, it looks as though Paroubek, the close runner-up in the June election, will finally get the chance he's been waiting for and have another go at forming a government himself.

A few controversial faces

Although at first glance Topolanek's Cabinet doesn't look too different from its first incarnation — many of the ODS ministers, for instance, will remain in their posts — the few new faces have already generated controversy.

The 70-year-old aristocrat, senator and Swiss citizen was nominated by the SZ to be the next foreign affairs minister, although he's a member of the Civic Democratic Alliance (ODA).

Klaus has said that someone who has spent most of his life living in Austria — Schwarzenberg left Czechoslovakia in 1948 to escape persecution by the communists, but he returned in 1989 after the regime changed — shouldn't be foreign affairs minister.

The new regional development minister, recently elected KDU-ČSL chairman Jiří Čunek, meanwhile, has strong support within his party, but public opinion of him is divided.

Some call him a racist. Čunek is, after all, the mayor of Vsetín, north Moravia, who moved out much of the town's Romany population right before the local elections last October.

According to Cabada, what's most surprising about Topolánek's new cabinet is how much the ODS has given in to its coalition partners, especially the SZ.