Václav Klaus

Biography

Václav Klaus was born in Prague in 1941 and graduated in foreign trade economics from the University of Economics, Prague, in 1963, with study stays in Italy and at Cornell University. He worked at the economics institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences until 1970, then held staff posts at the Czechoslovak State Bank from 1971 to 1986 before joining the Academy's Institute for Prognostics.

During the Velvet Revolution he offered his services to Civic Forum, and on 10 December 1989 he became federal finance minister, the architect of voucher privatisation. Elected Civic Forum chairman in 1990, he led its free-market wing into the new Civic Democratic Party (ODS) in 1991. After ODS won the June 1992 elections he became Czech prime minister and agreed with Vladimír Mečiar to dissolve Czechoslovakia; he led the independent Czech Republic's government until a party funding scandal forced him out at the end of 1997.

Under the 1998 'opposition agreement' with Miloš Zeman's Social Democrats he became speaker of the Chamber of Deputies until 2002. Elected president by parliament in 2003 and re-elected in 2008, he was known for Euroscepticism, delayed signing the Lisbon Treaty until November 2009, and rejected man-made climate change. A sweeping amnesty in January 2013 led the Senate to charge him with high treason days before his term ended in March 2013. He has since backed European far-right parties and in December 2025 became president of the Clintel foundation.