After more than two years of political and economic decline, voters turned out en masse on Friday and Saturday in an effort to stabilise the Czech political scene.
With 74.3 per cent of registered voters casting their ballots, the Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD) garnered most votes - pulling in 32.31 per cent. But the former prime minister, Mr Vaclav Klaus, and his withered Civic Democratic Party (ODS) finished a strong second with 27.74 per cent of the vote.
Numerically there are several coalition possibilities, but all seem a bit precarious for one reason or another. The Social Democrats won 74 of the 200 seats in the lower house, while Mr Klaus's ODS party took 64 seats. The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) took 24 seats, followed by the Christian Democratic Union-Czechoslovak People's Party (KDU-CSL) with 20. The Freedom Union (US) party - whose members rebelled earlier this year against Mr Klaus's autocratic and dubious style of governing by leaving the party to start a new one - won 19 seats.
All the party leaders have remained non-committal about the coalition possibilities. President Vaclav Havel - still recovering from life-threatening intestinal surgery in April - will have his work cut out to broker a viable coalition. He earned plaudits for his mediation after the 1996 elections, but the Social Democrat leader, Mr Milos Zeman, and his arch rival Mr Klaus may conspire to blunt the president's efforts.
As the two larger parties have both won enough seats to form a coalition with the two smaller mainstream parties, a broad coalition between them seems unlikely given the deep animosity that exists between them.
The problem for the Social Democrat chairman, Mr Zeman, is the Freedom Party, arguably the only genuinely right-wing party.
Mr Klaus, for all his Thatcherist rhetoric has moved the country so slowly toward economic reform that he has been dubbed a socialist. The Christian Democrats publicly consider themselves right-of-centre, though their programme shows they could easily co-exist in a Social Democrat-led government.
Everyone agrees on the need for a strong majority government. A minority government was cobbled together two years ago. Then two Social Democratic members defected, one of them becoming a king-maker as the decisive vote on key issues.
But a worsening economy raised tensions, leading to the collapse of Mr Klaus's government last November.