Slovak President welcomes Havel re-election

Slovak President Michal Kovac said on Wednesday he saw the re-election of Vaclav Havel as a sign of the Czech Republic's political maturity.

Kovac sent a telegram saying he was pleased at Havel's victory, and that he "and the majority of the Slovak public" considered it "one of the fruits of political maturity and a decision by ordinary Czechs to continue the long, sometimes arduous journey on which they embarked in November 1989", the Slovak news agency TASR reported, quoting presidential press spokesman Vladimir Stefko.

Kovac wished Havel good health, and said he would congratulate him personally at the two-day meeting of Central European leaders which begins on Friday at Levoca in Slovakia.

Kovac, whose own mandate expires next month, has been at loggerheads for much of his presidential term with Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar, who has used his party's majority in parliament to push through constitutional reforms to transfer powers from the president to parliament.

BBC Monitoring(http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.