The Czech parliament gave initial backing to a civil service bill, meeting a condition set by President Milos Zeman for naming the new government and ending a seven-month political stalemate.

The bill, endorsed by lawmakers in the first reading in Prague today, will remove a requirement for ministerial candidates to present a document proving they didn’t cooperate with the communist-era secret police, Zeman said Jan. 10. He said the law will allow him to name billionaire Andrej Babis, who doesn’t have the vetting, as finance minister.

The approval is a step toward Zeman naming the cabinet. He appointed Bohuslav Sobotka, who is seeking to restart economic growth, as prime minister last week. Sobotka’s Social Democrats, Babis’s ANO party and the Christian Democrats plan to reverse a three-year austerity campaign that helped drive borrowing costs to the lowest in emerging Europe while exacerbating a six- quarter economic slump.

“We in the coalition who think the government should be created as soon as possible” to end the interim cabinet’s term “considered it appropriate to meet the president’s condition,” Vera Jourova, a deputy for ANO, told reporters before the vote.

Zeman has said he may name the full government by end- January, even as he raised objections to some nominees proposed by Sobotka. The president began meeting candidates for cabinet posts today, starting with Babis.

The yield on 10-year Czech government debt has averaged 3.8 percent over the past decade, compared with 5.6 percent for Poland, the EU’s largest post-communist economy, and 3.5 percent for higher-rated France. The Czech 10-year yield dropped 1 basis point, or 0.01 percentage point, to 2.31 percent as of 5:57 p.m. in Prague, holding below comparable U.S. Treasuries.

The three coalition parties said they backed the civil service bill to separate state administration from political influence and not to remove the secret-police vetting requirement. The opposition criticized the legislative procedure, saying parliament’s actions shouldn’t be dictated by Zeman’s demands.

“It is very undignified for the chamber of deputies to accept a pointless condition of the president,” Miroslav Kalousek, the head of parliamentary caucus of TOP09 party and a former finance minister, said in the debate.

Zeman has been reshaping the role of the head of state, traditionally seen as a ceremonial post, since he won the country’s first direct presidential election last year. He snubbed parliament and appointed a technocrat cabinet after the June collapse of Petr Necas’ administration in a scandal over spying, sex and bribery.