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/* Government and Political Conditions */
==Government and Political Conditions==
[[Image:Prague PD.jpg|left|200px]]
The legislature is bicameral, with a Chamber of Deputies (200 seats) and a Senate (81 seats). With the split of the former Czechoslovakia, the powers and responsibilities of the now-defunct federal parliament were transferred to the Czech National Council, which renamed itself the Chamber of Deputies. Chamber delegates are elected from 14 regions--including the capital, Prague--for 4-year terms, on the basis of proportional representation. The Czech Senate is patterned after the U.S. Senate and was first elected in 1996; its members serve for 6-year terms with one-third being elected every 2 years.
When the [[Berlin Wall]] fell in 1989 it meant that the Soviet Union was no longer in charge. The Communist satellite dictatorships of eastern Europe all fell in a matter of weeks--and Russia's collapsed in 1991. All the Communist parties of eastern Europe transformed themselves after 1989 into more mainstream center-left parties. One exception was in the Czech Republic where the Communist Party refused to undertake a comprehensive overhaul. It gained nearly 13% of the vote in the last parliamentary elections in 2006. Its supporters are mostly those fed up with politics as usual and regime nostalgics, many of them elderly pensioners, for whom life before 1989 seemed better than it does today.
From 2003 to 2013 [[Vaclav Klaus]] was president President of the Czech Republic. He believed knows that belief in [[environmentalismglobal warming]] is a threat to [[freedom]], [[democracy]], the [[market economy]] and [[prosperity]].<ref>http://www.ft.com/cms/s/e9df7200-19c7-11dc-99c5-000b5df10621.html</ref>
===Principal Government Officials===
