The political panorama is continuously revived by the recurrent controversy between president Václav Klaus and the foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg
The typical skirmishes between the head of state Vaclav Klaus (69 years of age) and the Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg (73) are clear evidence of how – after more than twenty years since the fall of the communist regime, in the Czech Republic, deeply rooted is the diffidence and frequent incompatibility between – the citizens who lived the period of the regime on the homeland and those instead who were able to return only after the Velvet Revolution.
The first, always ready to reproach the others for having abandoned the mother country, for practically becoming foreigners and unfit to judge what it was like during the regime.
The ex expatriates instead, more willing of course to accuse the others of yielding to the dictatorship and of not having had enough courage to change things – and even for having made compromises with the regime.
The endless friction between Klaus and Schwarzenberg from this point of view is absolutely emblematic.
One of the last clashes between the two goes back to when, just a few months ago, the eurosceptic Klaus, speaking of the Foreign Minister’s trip to Brussels, declared he did not trust Schwarzenberg. The President said outspokenly that he considered him, as far as the European issues are concerned, as “one from the other side of the barricade” and did not fail to reproach the man, responsible for Czech diplomacy, who spent part of his life in Austria and Germany, for those decades of life spent travelling around Europe”.
Inevitable was the reply of prince Schwarzenberg, descendant of one of the noblest families of antique European tradition, who in 1948, with the advent of the regime, had to leave the then Czechoslovakia with his family to return only after 1989. “Klaus has his opinions and at his age it is difficult to make him change his mind”, a seemingly prudent premise, to which the elderly aristocrat responded with the thrust of a fencer of the past: “The President is perhaps conditioned by the teaching he received at school in the 1950s, when in the communist Czechoslovakia of that period, they taught him to consider negatively everything connected with the aristocracy”.
A joke which seemed to affect the President.
Klaus is in fact the typical example of a Czech citizen who, like many people of that period, never joined the communist party, but who neither openly took sides against the regime. He preferred to adapt to those conditions and that enabled him to attend university, to complete his studies with two stages abroad in the 1960s – the first in Italy at the University of Naples (thanks to an Iri scholarship) and the second in the United States, at the Cornell University in New York – and even to continue, after the Prague Spring, during the communist normalization period, his career as an economist for the Czechoslovakian National Bank and then for the Academy of Science.
A few weeks ago, from an old archive, we came to know that when Klaus was young, during the early 1960s, he was for a certain period considered as a possible candidate for the military secret service. Apparently, what cost him the possibility of a career in the communist intelligence service, were not his political ideas, but rather, as is reported in an old file by the security units, “his passion for sports and beautiful girls”.