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He says that a state prosecutor to whom he took his findings refused to pursue the cases for fear of being killed himself. Gordan Malic is another journalist who now relies on police protection. "Organised crime has become part of the establishment," he says.

The deputy head of Croatia's privatisation fund is currently on trial after he was secretly filmed by prosecutors apparently stuffing a brown envelope filled with money into his pocket. The pictures were all over the newspapers, the film is on YouTube (in Croatian). The Index of Economic Freedom recently ranked Croatia below several African states in one of its corruption measurements.

"You can see corruption with government officials and practically ministerial-level people with wealth that cannot be explained," says Natasha Srdoc from the anti-corruption think tank the Adriatic Institute for Public Policy.

"Croatia needs to put an independent judiciary, the rule of law, and protection of property rights in place before it gets into the EU, because if it is allowed to get in before then it will not reform - it won't do anything."

Croatian police recently arrested a number of suspects in a mafia crackdown.

The crackdown has been prompted by Croatia's desire to join the European Union (on 1 April Croatia became a member of Nato). But some here, like politics professor Zarko Puhovski of Zagreb University, complain of double standards.

"If you have Bulgaria and Romania in the European Union, if you have a divided Cyprus, if you have Greece with all the corruption and problems with its judiciary, if you have Baltic states with catastrophic minority politics and so on, then you can't see why Croatia has to commit itself to all these reforms before being accepted."

Others suggest that some EU member states opposed to further expansion have exaggerated Croatia's problems with organised crime and corruption in order to damage its accession prospects.

Topolanek already pushed Lisbon Treaty through the parliament, the legislature's lower house, in February, against the wishes of President Václav Klaus. However, it still needs to be pass through the country's senate before it can be ratified, and how the 81-member upper house will vote is anything but predictable. One thing is sure -- it's going to come down to the 35 votes held by Topolanek's ODS.

Pessimists like Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra say it's now going to be difficult to get the fractious senate to commit to an EU-friendly position. Optimists, meanwhile, hope that ODS representatives will take their cue from the general population's mood, since senators are directly elected by the people. And the EU is in good standing with Czechs at the moment, with polls showing up to 60 percent in support of the Lisbon Treaty. "In these times of economic crisis," says Robert Schuster at the Prague Institute of International Relations, "there's a feeling that it's better to belong to a large community."

it was two fellow members of his ODS party who helped oust Topolanek. Both voted against the prime minister, supposedly because they were unable to reconcile their political conscience with participation in a government that wants to implement the Lisbon Treaty.

That, however, is hardly the whole truth. The party is still deeply split between supporters of the president and those of the defeated prime minister. Topolanek is not the only one convinced that Klaus was behind the vote that brought him down -- the president has never made a secret of his animosity toward his rival. Klaus appears determined not to let Topolanek remain provisionally in office as a caretaker prime minister until the end of the Czech Republic's EU presidency. On Sunday Topolanek said that he was open to a deal with political rivals on an interim government, possibly led by someone else.

Even when the corruption grows too conspicuous to ignore, it often goes unpunished. Such was the case with Jiri Cunek, Topolanek's former deputy prime minister, who came under suspicion of having taken bribes. The investigation made no headway, the attorney in charge of the investigation was changed, and the case was eventually filed away. Cunek remains the Christian Democrats' party leader.

"There's a judicial mafia at work," says former Justice Minister Marie Benesova, explaining that in the Czech Republic the highest prosecutor works directly under the justice minister. That, she says, means the executive branch of the government can directly influence the judicial system.

The Social Democrats, who called the recent no-confidence vote in parliament, have also had their share of scandals. Former Prime Minister Stanislav Gross, for example, had to step down four years ago when he proved unable to explain how he had financed his luxury apartment in Prague.

The so-called "opposition agreement" has also had a disastrous effect on Czech politics. After elections in 1998 left a stalemate between the Social Democrats and the ODS, Social Democrat Milos Zeman and then-leader of the ODS Vaclav Klaus came to an agreement: The Social Democrats would be allowed to govern, but the ODS, as the opposition, could take part in decision-making. Zeman had to negotiate every decision in advance and the conservatives were rewarded with various concessions for their consent. And politics began to move behind closed doors.