The Czech Republic's bitter World War II history hung over the final stages of the campaign ahead of the presidential run-off elections on Friday and Saturday, in which leftist former prime minister Milos Zeman is facing conservative Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg.
A recent opinion poll by ppm factum put Zeman, prime minister from 1998 to 2002, ahead at 53.7 per cent.
Jumping into the fray, outgoing President Vaclav Klaus said Czech presidents should have spent their entire lives in the country, while his wife Livia remarked that she had difficulty imagining a first lady who could speak only German.
The comments targeted Schwarzenberg, 75, an aristocrat who spent the years 1948-89 - when the then Czechoslovakia was under communist rule - in exile in Austria.
"Everyone knows that I speak unclearly," he responded, as the poll developed into a kind of citizenship test for him and his wife Therese, a doctor who still lives in Austria.
The conservative Schwarzenberg secured a surprising second place in the first round two weeks ago, coming within a percentage point of Zeman, 68, a charismatic politician who has not held back from sharp criticism of the wartime role of the large German minority that was expelled after the war.
The contenders are, however, united in backing increased European integration and a central place for the republic in the EU. Either is seen as likely to enjoy better relations with other EU leaders and the United States than has Klaus, an outspoken conservative eurosceptic, who served the maximum two terms.
The battle for the presidency, a largely ceremonial post that Klaus nevertheless used to delay a major EU treaty and to vent his scorn on fears of global warming, had been billed as a celebration of democracy but has now turned vicious.
The Lidove Noviny upmarket daily expressed outrage that Zeman's team was spreading rumours to the effect that the Schwarzenberg palace in Austria had swastikas on the wall and pictures of people
giving the Hitler salute.
Zeman felt obliged to make a public apology.
"The atmosphere has flipped over completely," prominent economist and author Tomas Sedlacek told dpa. Where the campaign had been conducted in a largely positive climate until a week before the
run-off, it had now turned to mudslinging.
"What if the president's wife came from Kuala Lumpur?" he queried.
But almost 70 years after the end of the war, the Sudeten Germans who lived in the west of the country and provided Hitler with an excuse to march in in 1938, along with the post-war expulsion of 3 million German-speakers, have returned to haunt the political landscape.
The expulsion decrees were "an indivisible part of Czech law," Zeman said in a televised debate, adding in a thrust at Schwarzenberg that anyone "terming a Czechoslovak president a war criminal is
talking like a Sudeten German official."
Schwarzenberg has criticised the expulsion. "I blame our predecessors for applying the principle of collective punishment," he said, insisting that the president of the time, Edvard Benes, would
have faced trial in The Hague.
Zeman's tactics could rebound, in the view of Alexandr Mitrofanov, writing in the leftist daily Pravo. "It may delight his core voters, but only them," he said, accusing the former prime minister of arrogant and coarse tub-thumping.