Former Czech President Václav Klaus to receive top state award on October 28 national holiday

Lany, Central Bohemia, Oct 6 (CTK) – Czech President Miloš Zeman will bestow a state award on his predecessor in the post, Václav Klaus, on the occasion of the October 28 national holiday, he told Frekvence 1 radio today, without elaborating.

He would not give the names of other personalities to be awarded, saying may the radio listeners wait and see.

Zeman mentioned his decision to award Klaus when answering a listener’s question of whether he is going to remedy the situation where the first Czech president, Vaclav Havel, received the T. G. Masaryk Order and the Order of the White Lion, 1st Class, while Klaus has not received any state decoration so far.

“The listener is a prophetess. I should not tell it, but this will happen on October 28,” Zeman said.

Klaus, 88, held various top political posts for 23 years following the late 1989 fall of the communist regime.

He co-established the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) in 1991 and was its chairman for 11 years. He was the finance minister in the early 1990s and the prime minister (1992-98), lower house chairman (1998-2002) and president (2002-13).

Together with Zeman, the incumbent president and former Social Democrat (CSSD) chairman, and with the late former president Vaclav Havel (1989-2003), Klaus formed a threesome dominating the Czech political scene, mainly in the second half of the 1990s. For the whole of his career, Klaus had many fans but also many opponents among Czech people.

rtj/dr