Vladimir Meciar
Vladimir Meciar negotiated Slovakia out of Czechoslovakia in a country where most people, in both halves, said they wanted to keep it. He was a lawyer who had been expelled from the party after 1968 and spent twenty years as a factory legal officer. The revolution of 1989 made him interior minister and then Slovak prime minister within months, and he built a movement out of the grievance that Slovakia was governed from Prague and had been since 1918. The split was settled between two men over a fortnight in the summer of 1992. Meciar wanted a confederation with separate international standing; Vaclav Klaus preferred a clean separation to a state that did not function. Neither wanted what happened, exactly, and neither would concede - so the federation was dissolved on 1 January 1993 without a referendum in either republic, and opinion polling suggested a majority on both sides opposed it. It is the least violent breakup in modern European history, and the comparison that made it famous is with Yugoslavia, which was coming apart at the same time and did it the other way. His own governments were another matter. The privatisations transferred state assets to people close to the movement, the public broadcaster was brought to heel, and in 1995 the president's son was abducted and abandoned in Austria in an operation the courts later attributed to the intelligence service Meciar controlled; an amnesty he signed as acting president blocked prosecution for two decades. Slovakia was left out of the first round of NATO and EU enlargement explicitly on democratic grounds, and joined both in 2004 after he had lost power.
- Lived: 1942 CE – ?
- Nationality: Slovak
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
