President Vaclav Havel failed to win re-election by the parliament in voting Friday, casting further doubt on the future of the 74-year-old Czechoslovak federation.
Havel, the only candidate, received 148 of the 298 votes cast by the 300-seat Federal Assembly.He obtained the needed three-fifths majority in only one of the assembly's three chambers.
Preliminary calculations based on the outcome of the secret ballot and previous statements by party leaders suggest that Czech leftists, including the Communist Party, joined Slovak nationalists in opposing Havel's re-election.
Slovakia's governing party, the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, had repeatedly pledged to block Havel's re-election bid.
Parliament was to reconvene later Friday to decide on future business.
The voting began after Miroslav Macek, deputy chairman of the rightist Czech Civic Democratic Party, addressed lawmakers on behalf of Havel, calling him an "integrating personality."
Despite ongoing moves to split the country into Czech and Slovak republics, Macek said a vote for Havel would be a vote for a "common state, the democratic development of society and the con-tin-u-a-tion of economic trans-for-mation."
The parliament had recessed in disarray earlier in the morning, after the legislature's elections committee announced it had received a faxed message of withdrawal from the only candidate running against Havel.
Erich Kriz, the committee chairman, said he received the message of withdrawal from Juraj Cop, a 33-year-old engineer from Kosice in eastern Slovakia and an activist with the extreme-right Republican Party.
But Republican Party Chairman Miroslav Sladek said the withdrawal was not acceptable to his party.