He has paralysed the European Union by refusing to ratify the Lisbon treaty and dismisses global warming as a “myth”. Yet in one respect Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic has confounded his reputation as a man who likes to say no — his predilection for young blonde airline stewardesses.
The 68-year-old provocateur now holds the future of Europe in his hands but last year he found himself explaining to his wife, Livia, how he was improving his grasp of aeronautics in the company of yet another comely flight attendant. She was his third.
His first recorded indiscretion with a stewardess — Eva Svobodova — was in 1991, when he was a rising political star in the post-communist Czechoslovakia. The second was with Klara Lohniska, a 24-year-old flight attendant on his official aircraft. Last year, on the morning after winning re-election, he was photographed outside a hotel in Prague with Petra Bednarova, a 25-year-old stewardess on a government plane.
Klaus does not look or sound like a ladies’ man. A Financial Times journalist, who once took the Czech leader to tea at Fortnum & Mason in London, noted that he had “no small talk” and challenged nearly everything said to him. Even Fortnum’s lapsang souchong was not his cup of tea.
His bristling white moustache, square jaw and balding pate reminded another interviewer of a trade union leader — “or perhaps the manager of an engineering firm”.
Timothy Garton Ash, the historian, called him “one of the rudest men I have ever met”.
Klaus, an economist by trade, seemed to echo the philosophical musings of Eric Cantona, the footballer, in his response to revelations about his infidelities: “If a man crosses the street on a red light, then he must be prepared to slip or be run over by a car.”
Far from condemning his behaviour, most Czechs seemed to approve. “A mistress is generally considered a sign of a real man,” pronounced Dnes (Today), the nation’s biggest newspaper. “Czechs have just shrugged their liberal shoulders,” said Lidove Noviny, the populist daily.
However, many Czechs appear to share the frustration of European leaders at Klaus’s bombshell announcement that he was exercising the presidential right of veto over his own government’s approval of the Lisbon treaty. After Ireland’s yes vote in a referendum earlier this month, Klaus is now the only European leader holding out.
He would think about signing the treaty, he said, only if the nation obtained an opt-out from the charter of fundamental rights, which is incorporated in the treaty. His objection is that the charter may permit retrospective property claims by the Sudeten Germans, a 3.5m minority group expelled from Czechoslovakia after the second world war.
In Brussels this is seen as a delaying tactic, given Klaus’s loud forebodings about a European superstate turning into another Soviet Union. “We spent half a century under communist eyes,” he told Time magazine in 2005. “The European Union reminds us of Comecon [Moscow’s organisation for economic control of the Soviet bloc]. The decisions are made not in your own country. For us who lived through the communist era, this is an issue.”
Meanwhile, European leaders issue dire threats about expelling the Czech Republic and impeaching its president. “Impeachment will be the last threat if Klaus refuses to budge,” said a Brussels journalist. “But he can only be impeached by the Czech government, or alternatively the constitution could be changed to remove his power to obstruct international agreements. Klaus withholding his signature is not an option for the EU, because it would mean that the Tories would come to power in Britain and hold a referendum.”
Last week his respected predecessor, Vaclav Havel, the chain-smoking playwright, broke his silence to condemn Klaus’s “absurd” and “irresponsible” conduct. The two men have disliked each other ever since Klaus landed a job in Havel’s government.
The story goes that Klaus, a jazz fanatic, was infuriated by Havel’s failure to invite him to a jazz concert held in honour of President Bill Clinton’s visit to Prague. To Havel’s delight, Klaus made increasingly desperate attempts to obtain an invitation to the event — where Clinton joined a jam session — and was granted a ticket only at the last moment.
Now Klaus is lapping up the attention as statesmen plead for his signature. “His narcissistic personality loves being at the centre of attention and power,” a Czech politician told The Times last week, “and Czechs have a tendency to admire him because of their own lack of self-confidence.” Tensions between Klaus and Brussels erupted last December when a private meeting with senior MEPs descended into a slanging match. Klaus declared that he had never been so insulted.
Back at home there is no one who will seriously challenge the president’s dominance in the aftermath of the government’s collapse in the summer, when in-fighting toppled the minority administration and replaced it with civil servants. No election is in sight.
This leaves Klaus with a caretaker prime minister, Jan Fischer, a former bureaucrat from the statistics office with little legitimacy or stomach for a fight. Klaus’s grip on power has also enabled him to strut on the world stage and expound his controversial views on climate change. He described environmentalism as a “religion” and Al Gore, the Nobel laureate and former US vice-president, as its “apostle of arrogance”.
“Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so,” Klaus said. In his view, the International Panel on Climate Change is not a scientific institution so much as “a political body, a sort of nongovernment organisation of green flavour” composed of “politicised scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment”.
Klaus arrived in the world on June 19, 1941, the son of prosperous parents Vaclav and Maria. He spent his childhood in Prague and studied at the city’s school of economics. Deeply influenced by free market economists such as Milton Friedman, he also studied in Italy and the United States before working at the Czechoslovak state bank. An academic life beckoned until the velvet revolution happened in 1989.
He was no dissident but rather someone who felt like “a rejected genius”, according to a secret surveillance report, later made public. Klaus chafed under communism. His son and namesake, Vaclav, once recalled that when he was 13 his father told him to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to understand communism’s oppressive nature.
In the second week of the Prague revolution Klaus turned up at the offices of Civic Forum, the group opposing the communist regime, offering his services as an economist. When the regime fell he became finance minister but within a year his relations with the dissidents had soured. Havel recalled that Klaus had an aversion to “the rest of us, whom he had clearly consigned to the same Dumpster, with a sign on it saying ‘left-wing intellectuals’.”
In 1991 Klaus founded the new centre-right Civic Democratic party, which won elections the following year, making him prime minister. He was credited with playing a crucial role in the peaceful split of Czechoslovakia into two states — “the Slovak divorce” — in 1993. After being forced to resign as prime minister in 1997 over a party financing scandal, he had to step down as leader of his party three years later when it lost a second election.
Deciding to run in the presidential race to replace his old adversary Havel, in 2003 he narrowly won a secret ballot of the parliament — a position reaffirmed last year. In office he developed a zeal for rejecting legislation that displeased him. He rebuffed a “registered partnership” act, giving legal recognition to same-sex couples, describing it as a threat to Czech society. However, he lacked the power to block legislation indefinitely and the veto was overturned by parliament.
A fluent Russian speaker, he wooed Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, from whom he received the Pushkin medal for the promotion of Russian culture in 2007. Klaus blamed Georgia for the war in South Ossetia and was reticent in criticising Russia for cutting off oil supplies in retaliation for the Czechs’ agreement to site Nato radar on their soil.
Klaus has been left exposed by the recent turn of events, after President Barack Obama abruptly withdrew the missile shield offer as part of a supposed deal with Russia to back sanctions against Iran. Last week the deal appeared to have collapsed, with Russia reverting to its support of Tehran.
The Czech leader has received nearly 50 honorary degrees and published 20 books, most recently his anti-global warming tome Blue Planet in Green Chains. Detractors have noted that the Russian edition of the book was funded by the oligarch Vagit Alekperov, president of Lukoil, the Russian energy company.
Klaus castigates the green movement’s “megalomaniac ambitions”. There are those who fear he has fallen prey to them himself.
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