Czech president attacks acolytes of EU integration

                                
 By Ingrid Melander
                                
 BRUSSELS, Feb 19 (Reuters) - Czech President Vaclav Klaus
likened supporters of greater European Union integration to 
communists of the Soviet era on Thursday.
                                
 The Czech Republic holds the EU's rotating presidency but
this did not stop Klaus telling EU lawmakers unused to
eurosceptic speeches that their parliament intervened too much
in people's lives.
                                
 A treaty meant to streamline the bloc's creaking
institutions would only make things worse, he said.
                                
 Klaus said he rejected the "uncriticisable assumption that
there is only one possible and correct future of ... deeper and
deeper integration".
                                
 "Not so long ago in our part of Europe we lived in a
political system that allowed no alternative and therefore no
parliamentary opposition," Klaus said, referring to the
communist regimes that fell in 1989.
                                
 "Here (in the European Parliament) there is only one single
alternative, and those who dare think about a different option
are labelled as enemies of European integration," Klaus said.
                                
 Klaus's euroscepticism has irritated many in the EU even
though his post is largely ceremonial. The Czech Republic holds
the EU presidency for the first half of 2009.
                                
 Klaus said that although he believed there was no
alternative to EU membership for the Czechs, EU integration
could take many different forms.
                                
 He repeated his criticism of the Lisbon treaty on
institutional reform and refused to say whether he would sign
it. The Czech senate is still to vote on the treaty, probably in
April.
                                
 "I am not really ready to answer -- a chess player does not
announce his next moves," he told a news conference.
                                
 The Czech Republic is regarded as one of the last obstacles
to the treaty taking effect. Ireland has rejected the charter in
a national referendum and is to vote on it again this year. The
treaty must be approved by all 27 member states to take effect.
                                
 Klaus also criticised the EU's response to the economic
crisis and said the bloc needed less regulation, not more.
                                
 "We must say openly that the present economic system of the
EU is a system of a suppressed market, a system of a permanently
strengthening, centrally controlled economy.
                                
 "Although history has more than clearly proven that this is
a dead end, we find ourselves walking the same path once again,"
he said.
                                
 The president of the European Parliament, Hans-Gert
Poettering, offered an ironic comment immediately after Klaus's
speech.
                                
 "Thank God we live in a European democracy in which
everybody can express his or her own opinion ... In a parliament
of the past I am sure you would not have been able to give this
speech," Poettering told the assembly, earning applause.
 (Reporting by Sarah Luhers, Marcin Grajewski and Ingrid
Melander; Editing by Robert Woodward)