CZECHOPEDIA:

Miloš Zeman

8. 3. 2010 / Fabiano Golgo

Zeman was born in 1944 in the central Bohemian town of Kolín. After graduating from an economics secondary school he was denied, for political reasons, access to any third-level education. After four years, though, he became able to enrol at the University of Economics in Prague, from which he graduated in 1969. During the Prague Spring of 1968, Zeman joined the Communist Party led by the reformist Alexander Dubček, but after the Soviet-led occupation of Czechoslovakia he was expelled from the party because of his criticism of the new hard-line regime.

He developed a centre for prognostics, which was closed down in 1984 for its critical studies of social developments in the Czechoslovak socialist economic system. He was dismissed for the same reasons in 1989, while working at an agricultural organ. He was a participative member of the political movement that was born after the Velvet Revolution in November 1989. First at the opposition, leading the Social Democratic Party (ČSSD), he became prime minister after the early elections of 1998, leading a power-sharing government with the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) of previous premier Václav Klaus.

Zeman became notorious for his contempt for journalists. Calling them scum, idiots, liars, amateurs, prostitutes and other adjectives were fluid during his public tenure. Publicly known for being very fond of the Czech herbal liqueur Becherovka, Zeman declared to be just a retired old man when he moved away from political life after his term as premier, to his weekend house in the hills of the Vysočina region in the South-East of the country, at the time passing the guard to later European Commissary Vladimir Špidla. When he came back briefly for an unsuccessful bid for the presidency, he was apparently sabotaged by the new Social Democrat leadership. Now he is a candidate for the Party of Citizens' Rights (SPO) and is crossing the country in a political campaign bus nicknamed Zemák.

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