Miloš Zeman

Biography

Miloš Zeman was born in Kolín in 1944 and raised by his mother, a teacher. He studied at the University of Economics in Prague from 1965 to 1969. He joined the Communist Party during the Prague Spring of 1968 but was expelled in 1970 for opposing the Warsaw Pact invasion, and he spent the following years working for the sports organization Sportpropag and then the company Agrodat, losing that job in 1989 over a critical article.

His televised criticism of the economy in 1989 brought him into the leadership of Civic Forum during the Velvet Revolution, and he sat in the Federal Assembly from 1990. In 1992 he joined the Czech Social Democratic Party, which he led from 1993 and built into a major party. After the 1996 election he became president of the Chamber of Deputies.

When the Social Democrats won the 1998 election, Zeman formed a minority government under the Opposition Agreement with Václav Klaus's Civic Democrats, a pact widely criticized as a hidden coalition. His government continued privatization, created new regions and took the Czech Republic into NATO in 1999. He gave up the party leadership in 2001, lost the 2003 presidential vote in parliament after defections in his own party, and left the Social Democrats in 2007, founding the Party of Civic Rights in 2009.

In 2013 he won the first direct presidential election in the country's history and was re-elected in 2018. His presidency was polarizing: he was seen as friendly to Russia and China and clashed with the EU and NATO, though he strongly opposed Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He left office in March 2023.