Soon to be plain Mr and Mrs Klaus again, the presidential couple declare their true feelings for the would-be inheritors of 'their family seat'.


Our next First Lady?

After a week of ‘below the belt’ abuse from the president and his family, Karel Schwarzenberg reacted yesterday, in his own well-mannered way.

A mildly irritated Schwarzenberg suggested that his presidential opponents, one sitting in the castle, the other hoping to, belong to the same ruling clique.

There was never a chance that Schwarzenberg would sink to the level of his detractors. Instead, he went straight to the reason for their attacks on his person –an attempt to keep the castle out of the hands of a man they all -from the presidential candidate and the president, to the wife of the president, his sister (whose opinion, surely, does not count given she lives in Zurich?) and his elder son -would like us to believe is an outsider, even a German quisling.

I wonder what Milos Zeman’s daughter thinks? Shouldn’t we be told? She definitely lives here.

The assumption of hereditary entitlement displayed by Livia Klaus last week should be warning enough that the time has come for a revolution in the castle.

"Nechci, aby po mně na Pražský hrad přišla dáma, která bude mluvit jenom německy." ("I wouldn't like a first lady who speaks only German to come after me in the castle.")

All that is missing is the royal 'We'.

Schwarzenberg's supporters must be hoping that the spectacle of soon-to-be plain Mr Klaus fighting so openly for Zeman’s political future would harm both in the end.

Do Zeman’s supporters in the Karvina really respect the views of the wife of a man who lives in such splendour at their expense, and who has just amnestied hundreds of white-collar criminals, many of whom were once thought to be members of his own court?

Klaus and Zeman are the personification of the essential redundancy of the party political struggle in this country. Their mutual loathing of the ‘foreigner’ Schwarzenberg is motivated by a fear of losing power, not to Germans nor even to princes with bad locution, but to the next generation of Czechs.

It is exactly Schwarzenberg’s ‘foreignness’ that appeals to so many people. It is precisely the hope that he does not belong to the ruling family of Klaus and Zeman that makes people want him for president.

Zeman has added a new campaign slogan to his billboards this week:

„STOP této VLÁDĚ“

This is a sentiment that the great majority of us share. Very few will much miss this government when finally it goes. But we hardly need, and certainly should not wish for, a president who makes it his business to bring down his own governments. For this government is the president's government -whoever is president and whichever the government.

We should remind Milos Zeman that, for a president as for a constitutional monarch, the government is always ‘our's’, and never ‘their's’.

The head of a state with a parliamentary system should remain above the competition between parties, however inconsequential that competition might be.

Now we have a would-be president declaring what many of us know to be the case, especially those who know Zeman best, his former CSSD party colleagues –that Zeman as president will scheme against his own, popularly-elected government whether that government is led by ODS or by CSSD.

In recent times, people have grown accustomed to the idea that their president was actively harming the well being of his country. As Klaus knows to his cost, the pen is mightier than the sword, and words more loaded with meaning when uttered by a head of state.

The derision with which Klaus as president has treated so many foreigners (apart from Vladimir Putin) has not helped the Czech Republic project its somewhat limited power abroad.

Neither candidate is greatly to be desired. But if we want a president that foreign heads of state will actually be pleased to meet (apart from Vladimir Putin), and if we want a president that will allow the government to govern without constant presidential interference, then vote for the ‘foreigner’, Karel Schwarzenberg, and not for a man who behaves as if he, and not the government chosen by the people, is entitled to rule over us.