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The 2000 Czechoslovak parliamentary election was held on the 24th September 2000 to elect 300 members to the National Assembly. It was the second time Czechoslovakia had held a parliamentary election concurrently with a popularly elected presidential one after 1985.
The election saw Prime Minister Vladimír Špidla of the ČSSD running for a second term. Špidla had overseen a period of moderate economic growth combined with a much better relationship with President Havel, as he and Havel saw eye to eye on foreign policy much more than Zeman and Havel had. Despite this, he was hurt by aggressive criticism from the opposition for implementing tax increases on the rich and was seen by many on the left as a dry technocrat, as well as incurring criticism from the backbenches from figures like Zeman.
Causing further problems for the ČSSD-led government was the organization of an agreement between Václav Klaus and Ján Čarnogurský, who had taken over as OLS leader after its disastrous performance in 1996. Čarnogurský made sizeable policy concessions to Klaus’s ČKLS that moved the OLS to the right in exchange for Klaus’s party merging back into the OLS; despite this, the OLS was subsequently hurt by the decision of President Havel to resign his membership of the party after its new ČKLS-influenced constitution was approved by the membership in 1998.
One of the biggest concessions made during the negotiations was that Klaus would be made the OLS’s candidate in the 2000 presidential election. Since Klaus was still a deeply contentious figure, this led Špidla and Havel to decide to postpone dissolving the National Assembly until it would be elected concurrently with the new President, ostensibly because this would make the campaign less expensive and more efficient but also because it would emphasize anti-Klaus and pro-government voting.
In order to maximize the chance of victory in the 2000 presidential election, several anti-Klaus parties united in standing down their own parties’ candidates in favour of the ČSNS’s popular leader and Cabinet member Rudolf Schuster. As a Slovak, socially fairly liberal and economically moderate politician, he stood out in stark contrast to Klaus and defeated him easily, the first time in 40 years the ČSNS had controlled the presidency.
Meanwhile in the parliamentary election, the ČSSD had retained a lead in the polls despite the OLS’s growth after the merger, but Špidla was not popular with the public and the DSS leader Miroslav Grebeníček withdrew his party’s support of the government after seven years, attracting more support from left-wing protest voters to the DSS. Despite this, after negotiations between Špidla and the new ČSL leader Cyril Svoboda (who had succeeded Josef Lux after his death from leukaemia in 1999) saw Svoboda pledge that his party would support the largest party after the election, the OLS was isolated by its traditional ally taking a more centrist position, and Čarnogurský and Klaus started to conflict over their respective pro-Europeanism and Euroscepticism.
The presidential election helped the mainstream left-wing and right-wing parties and isolated the ethnic parties, with Coexistence losing seats and the SNS and SPR-RSČ both dropping out of the Assembly, the first time since 1978 the far right had not won any seats in a Czechoslovak election. The OLS won over 100 seats for the first time since 1989 and the ČSL enjoyed its best result since 1982, though it did not come close to the two main parties in seat count. Despite a significant decline in its voteshare and seat total the ČSSD once again came out of the election the largest party, and formed a renewed coalition with the ČSNS, Coexistence and the Greens, though this time it was a minority government supported by the ČSL.