Czechoslovakia Vote Sets Up a Sticky Summer : Election: Differing political agendas of nationalist Slovaks and rightist Czechs will make for heated negotiations.

Parliamentary elections in Czechoslovakia set the stage Saturday for a summer of protracted negotiations between Czechs and Slovaks over economic issues and still more wrangling over the relationship between the two republics.

According to exit-poll projections, nationalist-oriented and left-of-center parties dominated the voting in Slovakia, while in the Czech lands, rightist free-market economic reformers, who have been guiding Czechoslovak economic policy for the past 2 1/2 years, won handily.

It is widely expected that President Vaclav Havel will nominate Vaclav Klaus, currently the finance minister and the leader of the dominant Czech political grouping, the Civic Democratic Party, to form the government.

Klaus, however, will have some hard bargaining ahead in dealing with Vladimir Meciar, the caustic and combative Slovak leader whose party, the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, led the voting in his economically troubled republic.

In projected results of the Slovak voting for the all-important House of Nations, the Meciar party took 33.8%, followed by the Democratic Left Party with 15.5%, the Slovak National Party with 8.6%, and the Christian Democratic Movement with 8.2%.

In the Czech voting for the House of Nations, Klaus’ party, in alliance with the Czech Christian Democrats, apparently won 34%--well above the level the coalition had shown in recent public opinion polls.

A leftist alliance of former Communists and the Democratic Left Party came in second in the Czech lands with 14.2%, followed by the Czechoslovak Social Democrats with 6.7%, projections showed. The Liberal Social Union, the Civic Movement and the Christian Democratic Union each finished with about 5% of the vote, the minimum required for a party to win seats in the House.

Effectively, the strong showing by Meciar’s party in Slovakia could give the party new muscle to block passage of legislation it does not like. And for much of the past 2 1/2 years, it has liked very little legislation dealing with economic reform.

Reading the projections, a number of political figures predicted, in Havel’s words, “very difficult negotiations on the federal level.”

“What is important,” said political scientist Karel Kovanda, “is that there is one strong party in each republic.” That outcome, he suggested, had allowed Czechoslovakia to avoid the chaotic result that emerged from parliamentary elections last October in Poland, where 29 fractious parties have come close to paralysis, bringing down the government of Prime Minister Jan Olszewski last week.

But the apparent strength of nationalist parties in Slovakia, Kovanda said, could be illusory, since the parties are, in fact, seriously divided over issues of economic policy and national autonomy.

The Slovak industrial base has been hit hard by the shift in Eastern Europe’s economic orientation. Long the center of Czechoslovakia’s once-profitable arms industry, the region’s munitions factories are having a hard time selling their products and an equally hard time retooling for other production.

Unemployment has reached 11%, twice the level in the Czech lands. To many Slovaks, the economic policies of Havel and Klaus have seemed geared to benefit Czechs and to throw Slovaks onto the unemployment lines.

The political spectrum in Slovakia confounds easy analysis. For example, the nationalist-oriented party of Slovak Christian Democrats leans toward the Klaus philosophy on economic reform. On the other hand, the Slovak Democratic Left Party, while soft on the issue of Slovak nationalism, wants a distinct slow-down on economic reform.

Meciar will have to contend with these and other bumptious interest groups in negotiating with Klaus over the makeup of the federal government and other issues.

A former Communist who transformed himself in the campaign into a skilled populist stump speaker, Meciar toured the republic promising to save jobs, control the price of housing, keep factories running and increase government assistance to mothers, pensioners and farmers.

The outcome of the nationalist issue remained as cloudy after the two-day election as it was before. Public opinion polls recently have consistently shown that the Slovaks are heavily against outright separation from the Czech republic, and yet the threat remains a powerful bargaining chip.

Indeed, Meciar’s bloc of votes in Parliament stands to be a powerful bargaining chip on any issue, including the reelection of Havel. The Federal Assembly is scheduled to vote on Havel’s candidacy July 3. The election of a president requires a three-fifths majority of elected members, which effectively gives the Slovaks the potential to defeat him. At the moment, however, there is no serious opponent to Havel in the running.

The election results demonstrated another pattern that is in keeping with the post-Communist trend in Eastern Europe: Liberal anti-Communist activists fared badly here, as they have in Poland. Although labels are not an exact parallel to those applied in the United States, these groupings are roughly parallel to Democratic Party liberals in the United States, and their fortunes, lately, have been analogous as well.

In the Czech elections, the liberal wings of the former Civic Forum, made up largely of former dissidents--who for years carried the torch of opposition against the Communist regime--were generally ignored by the voters.

The Civic Movement Party, headed by Jiri Dienstbier, a longtime dissident activist who has won high marks as foreign minister in the last two years, managed a bare 5% of the vote for the House of Nations and fell below the 5% cutoff point in voting for the House of the People and the Czech National Council, projections showed.

The Civic Democratic Alliance, another fragment of the old Civic Forum, came in with only 5.4% for the House of the People, 4% for the House of Nations and 6.1% for the Czech National Council. In Slovakia, the Civic Democratic Union, known as the People Against Violence back in the anti-Communist revolution days of 1989, finished below 5% across the board, according to projections.

“We have to congratulate those who won,” Dienstbier said Saturday, “and we also have to realize we have a polarized situation in the country. We also have to recognize a swing to the right. I hope it is not too absolute.”