Vaclav Klaus, an unusually combative Czech

摘要

By any measure, Vaclav Klaus, who is both the Czech parliament's speaker and the leader of the country's main opposition party, is a most singular Central (please, not East) European. As finance and then prime minister, he ran a post-communist government for longer than any of the region's counterparts, bar Slovenia's. He achieved the rare feat of busting a country (Czechoslovakia) in two, and staying in charge of the better half. He has been as ardent as any of post-communism's free-marketeers, merrily accepting the label Thatcherite. More unusually for a Central European, he sounds more critical of the European Union than other mainstream politicians in the region. And though the pollsters say that most Czechs dislike the adversarial, arrogant, clever Mr Klaus, the pundits in Prague, his country's capital, think he still has a chance of getting back into power.