Czechoslovak President May Step Aside : Politics: An aide to Vaclav Havel says he will withdraw as candidate for second term if Slovakia secedes from federation.

President Vaclav Havel, the former dissident and playwright who has led Czechoslovakia since the 1989 revolution against the Communists, will withdraw his candidacy for a second term next month if the Czechoslovak federation fails to hold together, a presidential aide said Monday.

(Talks between the top two Czechoslovak politicians holding the key to the country’s future failed today, and Prime Minister-designate Vaclav Klaus said Czechoslovakia will probably split, the Associated Press reported.

(“The federation is lost,” Klaus said after meeting with Vladimir Meciar, leader of the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, which swept the eastern region in a weekend general election, the news agency said. Further talks were scheduled for Thursday.)

The unity of the Czech and Slovak state has come under increasing doubt after weekend elections in which Slovak nationalist parties led the voting. The victorious Slovak parties are also pressing for a slowdown in post-Communist economic reform.

The assertion from the president’s office was clearly an attempt to throw the weight of Havel’s considerable prestige and personal popularity behind efforts to hold the restive Slovaks within the federation.

The president’s spokesman, Michael Zantovski, said Havel linked his decision to seek a second presidential term to “the possibility of enforcing certain moral values, and his candidacy would be meaningful provided that the common state is kept and that the path taken after November, 1989, is still followed.”

“If not, Havel would withdraw his candidacy for Czechoslovakia’s president. He considers ethical values more important than remaining in office.”

In Czechoslovakia, the president is elected by a three-fifths vote of the Federal Assembly. In the alignment for the new Assembly, the Slovak bloc is strong enough to block his election, should its leaders decide to oppose his candidacy.

Klaus, leader of the strongest party in the Czech lands, has been designated by Havel to put together a government.

An official of Klaus’ right-wing Civic Democratic Party said the prime minister-designate met his rival, Meciar, halfway between their respective bases in Prague and Bratislava, the Slovak capital. The exact location was not disclosed.

Earlier, Meciar met with other Slovak party leaders, including two staunch nationalists, to work out bargaining positions before his sessions with Klaus.

Meciar said Sunday that he regards Havel’s chances of election as “minimal.” Klaus, on the other hand, said Havel’s election is a “precondition” for serious talks.

The elections were clearly read as a setback for the Havel camp. In the Czech republic, many of his former allies from his days as a dissident were turned out of office, including the foreign minister, Jiri Dienstbier.

And in both the Czech and Slovak republics, many centrist candidates philosophically close to the president’s humanist principles went down to defeat. The victors, in the main, were those who staked out hard positions on the right, on the left and on nationalist issues.

The rightists were chiefly represented by Klaus’ Civic Democratic Party, which has espoused a swift movement toward privatization and market reform. Klaus is an admirer of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His program as finance minister for the past 2 1/2 years has gone down well in the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia, where his party won about a third of the vote.

But it has been deeply threatening to the third of the country’s 15 million people living in heavily industrialized Slovakia, which has been hard hit by the loss of Soviet markets, particularly in the arms industry.

The Slovaks were most attracted by Meciar’s Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, which pledged to fight for a “new deal” from Prague on economic reform. Hard hit by unemployment--11%, compared with the Czech republic’s 2.5%--voters may have responded as much to his promises to keep factories open as to his promises to push for a still-undefined Slovak “sovereignty.”

Meciar’s party won about 35% of the vote. Former Communists, reconstituted and renamed as the Democratic Left Party, took about 18% of the vote, suggesting the importance of economic issues to the Slovak voters. The most strongly nationalist party, the Slovak National Party, won only about 10% of the votes.