Word: communist
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Klaus, an economist by training, is a highly divisive veteran of Czech post-communist politics who had served as finance minister and prime minister before becoming president in 2003. He was re-elected to the five-year office last year. The Czech president is no stranger to controversy. A dogged critic of all things E.U., Klaus most recently likened the bloc to the Soviet Union. He is also a rare yet prominent global warming doubter - he does not believe that climate change is caused by man and has called costly measures to curb it a waste. (See pictures of Victory...
...Klaus plans to sign the treaty eventually, why create all this fuss? His friends and his enemies alike say that a combination of two traits feeds his passion for going against the flow: he yearns for the limelight and he views himself as infallible. Even during the communist era, an informer spying on Klaus as he took part in informal economics discussions described him as an abrasive know-it-all. "He makes it clear that who does not go along with his ideas and opinions is simply stupid and incompetent," reads Klaus' secret police file. In team sports, former Czechoslovak...
Klaus' critics add that his long-standing rivalry with acclaimed former President Vaclav Havel, the icon of anti-communist resistance, has only reinforced his desire to make a mark. Klaus has been in office for six years, but people still confuse him with Havel, accidentally calling him by his predecessor's name. "He will never have Havel's standing but he wants to show: 'I am here too,'" says Jan Ruml, an ex-politician who fell out with Klaus in the 1990s. "He wants to make history, [even if] negatively. He does not care." (Read "Freed from Power, Havel Mocks...
...more of the same. Conservative daily Le Figaro now says it will also suspend publication on three French holidays. That follows the earlier lead of financial dailies Les Echos and La Tribune to sit out national holidays - a sous-pinching habit to which Catholic daily La Croix and its communist opposite L'Humanité have also since subscribed. (See pictures of France celebrating Bastille...
...feet. One of the commission's key findings was that industrial policy should have been better coordinated and the money invested in a few promising centers, rather than being showered as if from a watering can across the economic landscape. But the fact remains that when the communist state collapsed, the urgent issue at hand was how to integrate 17 million East Germans into a suddenly reunified country, and quickly. Despite some lingering resentment in both east and west, that work is done. In a line policymakers today might take to heart, Zimmerman of the DIW says that the infusion...