By Jan Lopatka
PRAGUE, Feb 15 (Reuters) - Right-wing Czech economist Vaclav
Klaus won a fresh mandate on Friday to challenge European
integration and the campaign to stop global warming with his
election as president for a second term.
The monetarist professor has long divided the Czech
political scene and enraged some other European leaders over his
fierce opposition to shifting more power to Brussels.
In recent years he has also picked a new front to take on
the consensus, saying leftists have hijacked the global warming
issue in what he calls a campaign against freedom.
As the central European country's president for another five
years, he will not have much day-to-day executive power but he
will have a strong base to voice his opinions with less need to
temper his words because he cannot stand for re-election.
Diligent and self confident, Klaus was for over a decade the
pragmatic counterweight to playwright and former dissident
Vaclav Havel, his predecessor at the Prague Castle.
The always soul-searching Havel championed an open society
in which individuals, non-government organisations, private and
political groups all have a say.
Klaus, 66, has always seen the world as a place of clashing
interests where political parties with mandates from voters are
the legitimate voice. Written off by many after losing a 2002
election, Klaus was elected president a year later.
He saw no alternative to the country's 2004 entry into the
European Union, but is a staunch opponent of ever closer union
and federalism.
"The original idea of European integration was removing
barriers. That has been overlaid by regulation, additional bans,
decrees and commands," he said in a newspaper interview earlier
this month.
DISPUTED REFORM RECORD
Organising unauthorised economic seminars in the Communist
era of the 1980's, he caught the eye of the secret police but
unlike Havel never faced prosecution.
In the early 1990s, he was the first to speak up for a
standard, party-based political system instead of sticking to
politics done by fuzzy alliances of anti-Communist groups.
He formulated the key tasks of Czech economic transformation
and took the first tough steps of devaluation and price
liberalisation under tight fiscal discipline.
But his free market preaching was not always reflected in
his policies as Czechoslovak finance minister in 1989-1992 and
as prime minister from 1992 to 1997.
He kept banks in state hands, which meant continued lending
to ailing Communist-era conglomerates. The result was a banking
crisis which cost the country billions of dollars.
Klaus also long opposed capital market regulation, which
brought the wrath of investors who felt cheated by corporate and
investment fund raiders and scared away foreign investors.
When world leaders began to shape policies to halt global
warming, Klaus embarked on a new quest. He has challenged the
belief of most scientists that coordinated action is needed to
halt warming of the Earth.
"Communism has been replaced by the threat of an ambitious
environmentalism," he said last year when promoting his book on
the topic, called 'Blue, not Green Planet'.
(Editing by Matthew Tostevin)
(For the main story on the election, click on [])
