Visitors can be trying at the best of times, so it was no surprise, in such a
difficult week for the Irish government, that nerves began to fray when
Czech president Vaclav Klaus popped in for a few days.
The 67-year-old is an outspoken and larger-than-life figure in his homeland,
which takes over the presidency of the European Union from France in
January. It will be the first time a former Soviet bloc country leads the
EU, but Europhiles hoping for one of those “hand of history” moments
are in for a disappointment.
Last month Klaus described the EU presidency as “insignificant”. He likens
Europe today with the continent which carved up Czechoslovakia under the
1938 Munich Agreement. At other times he has warned that the EU is as big a
danger as the former Soviet Union.
His dinner with Declan Ganley, the anti-Lisbon Treaty campaigner, at the
Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin on Tuesday, was entirely in character, as were
his remarks afterwards. “I would say that the Czechs share the views of the
citizens of Ireland,” he said, referring to the verdict of the referendum in
June.
Compared to his previous comments on Europe, this was harmless stuff. But
Micheal Martin, the foreign minister, couldn’t contain himself. It was “an
inappropriate intervention in the context of such a state visit,
particularly at a time when the Irish government is engaged in discussions
with our partners in the EU,” he snapped. “He doesn’t represent the views of
the \ government in terms of his views on Europe.”
If Martin thought he had put Klaus back in his box, he clearly hadn’t done his
homework. “Such hypocrisy I cannot accept,” the president told Czech
reporters in Dublin. “If someone doesn’t please me, I will say so to his
face — and not behind his back. I really sense the huge problems of
democracy disappearing in Europe, but when I see the reactions of the Irish
foreign minister and some of the Irish press, I think it is even worse than
I expected.”
Martin misread, too, the thinking of the Czech government. Mirek Topolanek,
the prime minister, said he fully respected the president’s view. His own
opinion is only “slightly different”.
Anyway, Topolanek has bigger problems. He has been severely damaged by his
party’s poor showing in recent regional elections. His weakness means his
presidency of the EU is being called into question even before he takes
over. There have been not-very-subtle suggestions that perhaps the French
presidency should be extended, which prompted the Czech foreign minister,
Karel Schwarzenberg, to remark that “the French and Mr Sarkozy do not want
to part with being the president of Europe”.
Klaus, who once lost the job as prime minister and leader of the party he
founded, must enjoy his replacement’s discomfort. Rumour has it he is
angling to have Topolanek ousted and replaced by one of his own protégés.
He was born in June 1941 and grew up in a well-to-do neighbourhood of Prague.
He graduated from the city’s University of Economics and later studied in
Italy and America. He worked as an academic until 1970 and then moved to the
Czechoslovak State Bank.
In 1989, during the second week of the so-called Velvet Revolution in Prague,
Klaus turned up at the offices of the Civic Forum, the group opposing the
communist regime, offering his services as an economist. He wrote and
delivered the dissidents’ demands to the authorities. When the regime fell,
he became minister of finance in a “government of national unity”.
Within a year, according to the memoirs of the then Czech president Vaclav
Havel, the dissidents had fallen out with Klaus. He was a right-wing free
marketeer said to keep a picture of Margaret Thatcher above his desk. His
former allies tried to make him return to the bank, but he refused and
instead was elected chairman of the Civic Forum party. “While we were
concerned with running the country, Klaus was concerned with building his
own power through attacking us as ‘elitist’,” said Jiri Dientsbier, a former
foreign minister and the Civic Forum leader deposed by Klaus. “This is a
tactic he has continued to this day.”
A year later the party split. Klaus founded and became chairman of the Civic
Democratic Party. In June 1992, it won the national elections and he became
prime minister. He embarked on a controversial mass-privatisation strategy
which was dogged by accusations of mismanagement, insider trading and
white-collar crime. Havel described Klaus’s economics as “gangster
capitalism”.
After a period of rapid growth, the Czech economy faltered in 1997. Bad loans
had piled up and international fund managers pulled out of its currency, the
koruna. Unemployment rose sharply. An austerity budget shattered public
confidence and prompted a series of anti-government demonstrations, the
largest since 1989.
Klaus was forced to resign as prime minister, ostensibly over a political
funding scandal. “I do not think it would be productive for this government
to go on, and naturally it is out of the question for me to seek any kind of
important position in the government to come,” he announced on television.
For the next four years he wandered the political wilderness. In 2002, his
party lost a second election and Klaus was forced to resign as party leader,
being replaced by Topolanek. Relations between the two are said to have been
strained ever since.
Klaus decided to run for the presidency to replace Havel, his arch enemy. The
Czech president is not elected by popular vote but by a secret ballot of the
parliament. In 2003 Klaus won narrowly, securing 142 votes out of a possible
281. He was re-elected at the beginning of this year.
He has been as controversial a president as he was prime minister. His is
married to Livia Rosamunda Klausova, a Slovak economist, with two sons and
five grandchildren and there have been several revelations of his
extramarital affairs in Czech tabloids, none of which he has denied. There
has even been speculation that he planted the stories himself.
He regularly vetoes bills, although he does not have the power to block
legislation indefinitely. He opposed a “registered partnership” act, giving
legal recognition to same-sex couples, describing it as dangerous and a
threat to Czech society. The veto was overturned by parliament in March
2006.
He has become a vocal critic of the green movement, claiming global warming is
not a man-made phenomenon. His book on the subject has been translated into
several languages. It concludes: “The theory of global warming and the
hypothesis on its causes which has spread around massively nowadays may be a
bad theory, it may also be a valueless theory, but in any case it is a very
dangerous theory.”
He expressed surprise when Al Gore, the former US vice-president and
environmental campaigner, won the Nobel peace prize. “The relationship
between his activities and world peace is unclear and indistinct,” Klaus
declared. “It rather seems that Gore’s doubting of the basic cornerstones of
the current civilization does not contribute to peace.”
He is close to Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, no doubt impressing
him by being a fluent Russian speaker. He was awarded the Pushkin Medal for
the promotion of Russian culture by Putin in 1997, and has remained loyal
ever since. Recently Klaus distanced himself from criticism of Russia over
the war in South Ossetia.
His anti-Europe credentials stretch back to his failed general election
campaign in 2002, when he opposed the Czech Republic’s entry to the EU. As
president he refused to give any direction to the Czech electorate during a
referendum campaign on the issue, except to say that joining the EU would
significantly reduce Czech sovereignty. The vote was 77% in favour of
joining.
Klaus has vetoed the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty and last week he again
called on his party to oppose it. With Topolanek weakened, he might get his
way.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the French prime minister, hands over the European leadership
baton at a critical moment. The Czech Republic, which has not adopted the
euro, will be steering Europe through exceptionally choppy financial waters.
Klaus is an old-school champion of the free market. He has described Sarkozy’s
economics as “old socialism”. Topolanek has appeared to back him
on this, criticising government bail-outs of banks as counter to the
principles of the free market.
There have been suggestions that the Czech presidency could ignite a battle of
economic ideologies between the free market champions of the new states,
such as the Czech Republic, and the more conservative models of the older
members, including Germany and France.
Last week’s diplomatic spat could appear like a storm in a thimble compared to
what lies ahead. Who knows what political havoc Klaus may wreak in the EU in
the first half of next year? It will certainly be impossible for the Irish
government to re-run a Lisbon referendum with this Czech at the European
tiller.
