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In-Depth Information
the divorce. On January 1, 1993, after 74 years of troubled existence,
Czechoslovakia
was
officially divided into two new countries: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Czech politics under Klaus
Generally speaking, life was much kinder to the Czechs than the Slovaks in the immediate
period following the break-up of Czechoslovakia. While the Slovaks had the misfortune of
being led by the increasingly wayward and isolated Mečiar, the Czechs enjoyed a long peri-
od of
political stability
under Klaus, with Havel immediately re-elected as Czech president.
Under their guidance, the country jumped to the front of the queue for EU and NATO mem-
bership, and was held up as a shining example to all other former Eastern Bloc countries.
Prague attracted more foreign investment than anywhere else in the country and was trans-
formed beyond all recognition, its main thoroughfares lined with brand-new hotels, shops
and restaurants.
Klaus and his party, the ODS, certainly proved themselves the most durable of all the new
political forces to emerge in the former Eastern Bloc. Nevertheless, in the
1996 elections
,
although the ODS again emerged as the largest single party, they failed to gain an outright
majority. They repeated the failure again during the first elections for the Czech Senate,
the upper house of the Czech parliament. The electorate was distinctly unenthusiastic about
the whole idea of another chamber full of overpaid politicians, and a derisory thirty percent
turned out to vote in the second round. In the end, it was - predictably enough - a series of
allegations of corruption over the country's privatization that eventually prompted
Klaus's
resignation
as prime minister in 1997.
Political stalemate
The
1998elections
provedthattheCzechs hadgrownsickandtiredofKlaus'sdry,ratherar-
rogant, style of leadership, but what really did it for Klaus was that for the first time since he
took power, the economy had begun to falter. The
ČSSD
, or Social Democrats, under
Miloš
Zeman
, emerged as the largest single party, promising to pay more attention to social issues.
Unable to form a majority government, Zeman followed the Austrian example, and decided
to make an “
oppositionagreement
” with the ODS. This Faustian pact was dubbed the “Tol-
eranzpatent” by the press, after the 1781 Edict of Tolerance issued by Joseph II. The Czech
public were unimpressed, seeing the whole deal as a cosy stitch-up, and in 2000 thousands
turned out in Wenceslas Square for the
Díky a odejděte
(Thank you, now leave) protest, ask-
ing for the resignation of both Zeman and Klaus.
Havel
stepped down in 2003 after ten years as Czech president, to be replaced by his old
sparring partner, Václav Klaus. No Czech president is ever likely to enjoy the same moral
stature, though by the end of his tenure even Havel's standing was not what it used to be. His
marriage to the actress Dagmar Veškrnová, seventeen years his junior, in 1997, less than a
