Archive | March, 2013
22 March 2013 

Will Václav Klaus unite Europe’s eurosceptics?

V KLAUS (2012)

Photo: David Sedlecký via WikiCommons Media

Yesterday the Czech media was all aquiver with front page news in the left-wing daily Právo – and its associated news server Novinky.cz – that former Czech president Václav Klaus was ‘seriously considering’ running for the European Parliament. And that he was planning to do for the Civic Democrats (ODS) – the party he founded in 1991 and led for many years before stepping down as leader in 2002 then leaving altogether in 2008 in protest at his successor’s embrace of the Lisbon Treaty.

 What’s more, the story runs, as MEP Klaus, given his stature, would more or less automatically lead the European Conservatives and Reformers (ECR) group which brings together the British Tories, ODS, Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) in what is intended to be a mainstream conservative anti-federalist bloc.

 The newspaper quotes a ‘credible source’ while Klaus himself has said nothing publicly. But the ex-president is a cautious politician who likes to drop hints, fly kites and generally test the waters. So it’s plausible that someone in his entourage or Klaus himself did indeed  tip the wink. Indeed, he has already hinted directly in an interview in December that he was thinking about running for the EP for his old party, when I was sceptical)

 Could it happen? And could Klaus become a kind of EU-wide Leader of the Eurosceptic Opposition. Read More…

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7 March 2013 

Václav Klaus: A political phenomenon without political power

Photo: DerHuti Wikimedia Commons <a title="Licence" href=" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en"

Photo: DerHuti Wikimedia Commons

In many ways a medium-sized Central European country like the Czech Republic could hardly have wished for a better president: an experienced, energetic and erudite politician of international standing able to engage both with the big European issues and handle the domestic problems thrown up by fractious politicians and crumbling coalition governments.

 A president tough-minded enough to periodically remind its citizens that they were living not in an impoverished mafia state, but in a tolerably well-administered, reasonably prosperous, if inevitably flawed, European democracy.

 As president during the last ten years Václav Klaus has been all of these things.

 But he has also been a blisteringly controversial head of state, whose views have often been sharply at odds with most of his fellow politicians or fellow citizens. Provocative and unignorable, Klaus has been loved and (more often) loathed both at home and abroad. He leaves office facing an indictment for treason brought by opponents  for alleged constitutional violations. He is, as Czech political scientist Lubomír Kopeček rightly terms him in a recent biography, a political phenomenon.

 But what lasting impacts does Klaus’s ten year period in office really leave? Read More…

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