Václav Klaus
Václav Klaus was prime minister of the Czech Republic from 1992 to 1997, and of the Czech half of Czechoslovakia before it, and president from 2003 to 2013, the economist who was Havel's opposite in everything, the Thatcherite who took the finance ministry in December 1989 and made the transition his. There was the voucher privatisation of 1992-94 that gave every adult a book of coupons for shares in seventeen hundred state companies, which the investment funds then gathered and stripped. The prices were freed and the currency held, the unemployment kept at three per cent while Poland's went to sixteen. There was the phrase that there was no third way, and the meeting with Mečiar in the Tugendhat villa in Brno in August 1992 at which the two agreed to divide the country rather than govern it together, without asking the voters who opposed it. As president he refused to sign the Lisbon treaty for a year until the constitutional court made him. He flew the European flag over the castle only when Sarkozy came. He called global warming a myth and wrote a book saying so. He pardoned seven thousand prisoners in an amnesty in his last month that stopped the trials of the privatisation's fraudsters. He pocketed a pen at a signing in Chile on camera. He was born in Prague in 1941, studied economics at the Prague school and in Naples and Cornell, was pushed out of the academy after 1968 into the state bank, where he read Hayek and Friedman for twenty years. He joined Civic Forum in November 1989 as its economic voice. He took it over in 1990 and split off the Civic Democratic Party in 1991 as the party of the right. The government of 1992-97 fell when the party's financing scandal, with donors listed under false names and a Swiss account, brought its coalition partners out, and the banks that the state still owned and that had lent to the funds began to fail. The opposition agreement of 1998 with Zeman, in which the two large parties divided the state between them, gave him the speaker's chair and then the presidency, elected by the parliament on the third ballot in 2003 with Communist votes. He has spent the years since the castle saying that the European Union is the Soviet Union with a human face, that Russia was provoked in Ukraine, and that the Czech state is his, which a third of the country thinks and the rest does not.
- Lived: 1941 CE – ?
- Nationality: Czech
- Roles: prime minister, president, economist, politician
