They may well be still here but they don’t all seem to be in the same place politically. Even the lineup for Thursday’s gathering suggested as much. It was billed as a foreign ministers’ meeting — but, of the Visegrad countries, only Poland and Hungary had foreign ministers present. Slovakia and the Czech Republic sent state secretaries. [...]
The Czech Republic is planning to request observer status at meetings of eurozone finance ministers. Meanwhile, Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico said a couple of weeks ago that the “fundamentals” of his policy were being “close to the [EU] core, close to France, to Germany.” [...]
Petr Ježek, a Czech member of the European Parliament representing the centrist ANO movement, which leads in opinion polls ahead of a general election in October, said the Visegrad Group was a “useful format for regional cooperation” in the long term. But, he added, “I’m afraid that the government in Poland and to some extent the one in Hungary are not the ones one should team up with too much.” [...]
“Visegrad is not the only pillar on which the Czech Republic builds its Central European policy,” said Tomas Kafka, director of the Central Europe Department at the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, citing the country’s strategic dialogue with Germany and its so-called “Slavkov cooperation” with Slovakia and Austria.
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