Miloš Zeman - the controversial president of Czech Republic

Miloš Zeman is a Czech politician, economist and the third president of the Czech Republic. The took the office on the 8th of March of 2013. This article will now tell you a bit about this controversial president of a small central European country.

source: Lidovky.cz

My bias

Before you start reading this article, I think it is important, that you know my own personal bias.
I’m not a supporter of Miloš Zeman, I have not voted for him and his policies usually go against my own political views. I do admit, that I view him as a highly intelligent and skilled politician, but also as a cocky, self-centered and insulting person. But I will try to write this article in an as unbiased way as I am capable of.

Miloš Zeman life during the communist regime

Born on the 28th of September 1944 in the city of Kolin to a mother, who was a teacher, and a father, who was a post office worker. He studied an economic high school, but wasn't allowed to finish it, because of a paper in which he celebrated the book "Talks with T. G. Masaryk", that was banned by the communist regime.
In the end he was allowed to finish his studies, but was not allowed to study at a university. After two years of working in the accounting part of the Tatra Kolin company, he was eventually allowed to attend university and he started doing that in the year 1965. He studied at the political economy faculty of the Economical College in Prague and he finished his studies in the year 1969. At that time his friends thought of him as a gifted student, but also a cocky dreamer.

source: blog.aktualne.cz

He joined the communist party in the year 1968, but was expelled in the year 1970, because he disagreed with the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the forces of the Warsaw Pact. He worked in the Sportpropag from 1971 until 1984 in the department of complex modeling. After this he was working in the company Agrodat on simulation models of agricultural systems until the year 1989.

Miloš Zeman during the Velvet Revolution

On the 17th of November of 1989 he joined the Prague demonstrations, but his active participation in them is being refuted by some. He predicted the fall of the communist regime as a prognostic. He himself believes that he contributed the fall of the regime with his article named Prognostics and rebuilding that he essentially wrote in the year 1984 in the "Technický Magazín" (Technical Magazine). He actively joined the Civic Forum where he was brought by the journalist from "Svobodné Slovo"(The Free Word), Petr Kučera.

source: https://zpravy.aktualne.cz

Miloš Zeman in modern Czech history

He began his modern political career straight in the year 1990 as a representative without a party. With the election of 1992 he joined "ČSSD" (the Czech socialistic democratic party ) and he represented it until the separation of Czechoslovakia.
In the year 1992 he also became the chairman of the Prague city organization of ČSSD and a year later, in 1993, he became the chairman of the whole party. He then remained as the chairman of the party until the year 2001. This political party with its long lasting tradition, it existed long since before the communist regime after all, was helped by Zeman to become the strongest opposition party in a few short years and then even win the election to the parliament.
He became a member of parliament then again in the year 1996, when his party had an unprecedented success, that made it impossible for his main rival – Václav Klaus – to create a single party government.

source: http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/

His decision to allow the "ODS" (Citizens Democratic Party) was ran by Václav Klaus to run a minority government was the first real controversial decision – these days this is known as the “opposition agreement” and many of the Czech Republics first real political scandals stem from this time. Zeman became the chairman of the Parliament because of this agreement.
On the 22nd of July of 1998 he became the Czech prime minister as his party ČSSD won the parliamentary election, but again his one party government was a minority one, allowed to function only because of the controversial “opposition agreement”, except this time the parties have shifted their roles.
During his term, more specifically in the year 2001, he announced that he will not run for the office of party leader and that he is leaving politics altogether. But a large part of both the media and the politicians already predicted that he shall return.

Miloš Zeman return to politics

And the predictions soon came to be true. First he attempted to return to politics during the 2003 presidential election, but he didn't succeed and Václav Klaus became president.
After this failure he withdrew from politics for several years, only occasionally glossing the political situation in the country.
In the year 2012 he announced that he will run for presidency again, this time in the newly established general election (in the past the members of parliament voted on who will be the president). In the first round of the election he placed first with 24.21 % of votes cast and his opponent for the second round of the election was Karl Schwarzenberg who got 23.4 % of the votes cast. He then won the second and final round with a majority of 54.8 % of votes cast and became the third Czech president.

Miloš Zeman as the president

10:17 of the 8th of March 2013 was the exact time he became the third president of Czech Republic. And right in this same March, the first controversy of him as a president came to be. He wanted Livia Klaus, the former first lady, to become the ambassador of Czech Republic in Slovakia and the minister of foreign affairs Karel Schwarzenberg was opposed to that.
As his next controversial decision, after the government disbanded in 2013, he appointed Jiří Rusnok to be the new prime minister for a “bureaucrat government”, an act that has no support within the Czech constitution. This government didn't gain the trust of the parliament (a step necessary within the Czech system to legitimize the government) but because of the self-dissolution of the parliament ruled for a total of over six months without trust – an unprecedented thing in Czech Republic.
Another controversy of Zeman’s came to be when he was “unlocking the Czech coronation jewels” where he appeared to be drunk. Later an official statement of him being sick was released by the spokesman of the president, but this statement is often being regarded as just deflection.

*source: Čápos Youtube Channel

Then in October of 2013 another controversy came to be: After the premature parliamentary election he invited several people from the leadership of the winning party (ČSSD), but not the chairman of the party Bohuslav Sobotka. The people, who were invited first denied this meeting happened, but were forced to admit it under media pressure and this lead to them resigning from the leadership of the party and Bohuslav Sobotka becoming the prime minister.
The year 2014 was not controversy free, but most of them were sort of small controversies, like him discussing the human right issues in China and being more on the side of China and not Tibet, or him saying the Russian punk band Pussy Riot of a “pornographic band”.
The only large controversy of 2014 happened when he was interview by the first channel of the Russian state television in which he labeled the Ukrainian Civil war and economical help to Ukraine as “nonsensical”. Because of this on the 20th of November the Ukrainian ministry of foreign affairs summoned the Czech ambassador and said “the Czech president statements are unacceptable, because they don’t fall into the traditionally friendly Czech-Ukrainian relationship.”
Later – on the 3rd of January 2015 he was interviewed by the Czech newspaper Právo (Justice) and he labeled the Ukrainian prime minister Arsenij Jaceňuk as a “war prime minister”.
It would be untrue to call the next part of Zemans presidency controversy-free, but for the most part the controversies were pretty insignificant - including several theories of him being connected with Russian interests groups withing the Czech Republic, being labeled as an Islamophobe because of his antipathies towards migration and similar things. Another large controversy came to be in 2017, when at the turn of March and April he announced that child pornography was found on his computer about year prior and that those were installed by hackers from Alabama, but the police later found, that it is likely that the president found the child pornography on-line himself without any outside hacker’s influence.
The so far last controversy of Zeman has to do with the recent government crises, where he accepted the non-existent demission of the current Czech prime minister and then left the room without saying a word to him. This followed after the prime minster Bohuslav Sobotka declared that he would rather file a government demission, than having the highly controversial Andrej Babiš as a minister of finance anymore. Zeman was in support of Babiš.

source: http://www.lidovky.cz

Final Statement

Miloš Zeman is often viewed as a supporter of Russian interests in the Czech Republic and it his hard to not view him this way because of his multiple speeches at events ran by figures that are high in the Russian political hierarchy. He also often spoke highly of the Russian president Vladimir Putin and generally supported many Russian actions.

all the dates have been sourced from Wikipedia