On Wednesday evening in Prague arrived the moment pro-European Union Czechs had been dreading. On the very day that the Czech Republic and the European Commission held a formal ceremony to inaugurate the six-month Czech presidency of the EU, out came Vaclav Klaus to spoil the party.
The setting was Prague Castle, the seat of office of the Czech head of state, and Klaus and Commission president José Manuel Barroso had agreed to spend 20 minutes with the press after their talks.
Normally, such events are routine and utterly empty of newsworthiness. Not this time. Klaus broke with convention by making clear his disdain for the EU’s Lisbon treaty on institutional reform, a document Barroso and most EU leaders are deeply committed to.
“I hope Mr Barroso comes here more often and I convert him,” Klaus stated, knowing full well nothing of the sort would happen.
Barroso, looking as if he’d been served a fish’s eye at the nearest Prague restaurant, said glumly: “I’ve known President Klaus for many years now. We’ve always had interesting exchanges.”
Watching the two men’s painful public skirmish, I found myself wondering which Czech national hero Klaus, the self-styled upholder of free thought and the Czech right to be different, most resembles. It certainly isn’t Vaclav Havel, his predecessor as Czech president (check out the scornful reference to “philosopher-king ambitions” in Klaus’s op-ed for the FT on Wednesday).
It isn’t Jan Palach, the Czech student who immolated himself in 1969 in protest at the Soviet-led invasion that crushed the Prague Spring – Klaus is much too old for that. It isn’t Jan Hus, the medieval Czech religious martyr, and it isn’t even Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the founder of the first Czechoslovak state, whose statue towered behind Klaus as he spoke on Wednesday evening in Prague Castle.
No, the guy Klaus most resembles is someone altogether different. Klaus is a clever chap (as he well knows), but in his quirky defiance of authority, in his sense of solidarity with little players against big, and even in the shape of his head, Klaus is really a 21st century version of the Good Soldier Svejk.
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