(PRAGUE) - Czech Central Bank governor Zdenek Tuma predicted Friday that after Slovakia joins the eurozone next year no other countries would adopt the European single currency for four or five years.

"In the next four or five years there will be no new members of the euro zone," Tuma said at a conference in Prague when questioned which country might be next to follow Slovakia. "Nobody is in a position to do so," he added.

Slovakia is set to become the 16th member of the eurozone on January 1, 2009, after its membership bid was approved by the European Commission in May and by European finance ministers earlier this week. The decision still has to be rubberstamped by EU heads of state.

The current centre-right Czech government has set no target date for entering the eurozone, a step which it like other new EU members are bound to prepare for.

The Czech central bank has adopted a carefully non-aligned position on the politically sensitive question of whether fast euro adoption would be good for the rapidly growing economy.

Frontrunners for joining the eurozone following Slovakia are fellow members in the "Exchange Rate Mechanism II" waiting-room, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

The mechanism pegs countries currencies to the euro within a fluctuation band and is an obligatory step before entering Europe's single currency zone.

Slovenia's finance minister, Andrej Bajuk, the current chairman of the EU's council of finance and economy ministers, declined to predict which countries would follow Slovakia into the eurozone.

But he stressed euro membership should not be seen just as an economic issue but also as a contribution to the continuing process of European integration.

"We are all building a European union," he added.

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