Miloš Zeman
Miloš Zeman was prime minister of the Czech Republic from 1998 to 2002 and its president from 2013 to 2023, the first elected by the people, the forecaster who had been sacked from the planning institute in 1989 for an article saying the economy was in worse shape than Burma's. He took the Social Democrats from four per cent to the government in eight years, governing with Klaus's consent under the opposition agreement of 1998 that gave each party half the state and made the country's politics for a decade. The banks were cleaned up and sold to Austrians and Belgians, and there were the entry into NATO in 1999 and the accession talks with the European Union. There was the corruption that came with the agreement and that he called, when a reporter asked, the way things were. The presidency was the Bohemian tavern's voice from the castle. There were the visits to Moscow and Peking when no other Western leader went, the parade on Red Square in 2015, the proposal that Ukraine be paid to accept Crimea's loss. There was the remark that the Islamic migrants of 2015 were an organised invasion, the refusal to appoint a professor because of his private life, and the appointment of Babiš as prime minister twice and the delay of everyone else's. There were the Novichok remarks that contradicted his own intelligence service, the Becherovka and the cigarettes and the walking stick. There was the reversal in February 2022, when he said that the Russian invasion was a crime and that he had been wrong about Putin, which he had been. He was born in Kolín in 1944, studied economics in Prague, was expelled from the Communist Party in 1970 for opposing the invasion, worked in a sports company's forecasting unit and in the academy's prognostics institute. He spoke at the Letná demonstration of November 1989. He led the Social Democrats from 1993 to 2001, when he retired to a cottage in the Vysočina hills. He came back in 2013 to win the presidency against Schwarzenberg by ten points. The second term, won in 2018 against a chemistry professor by three points, was spent in a wheelchair and in hospital, with a chancellor, Mynář, who ran the castle and was later charged. It ended in March 2023 with the election of General Pavel, whom he had opposed and received with grace. He lives in the hills, is eighty-two. He still gives interviews about the Germans.
- Lived: 1944 CE – ?
- Nationality: Czech
- Roles: prime minister, president, politician
