(Repeats story published late on Sunday)
By Jan Lopatka
PRAGUE, Oct 4 (Reuters) - A divisive, right-wing economist
and a towering personality of Czech politics for the past two
decades, President Vaclav Klaus detests plans to tie the
European Union closer together.
Now he holds the key to final approval of the EU's Lisbon
Treaty.
The pact, aimed at streamlining decision-making in the bloc
of 27 countries and half a billion people, was approved in a
referendum in Ireland on Friday.
The treaty takes effect only if Poland and the Czech
Republic follow other member states in ratifying it. Poland's
president is expected to sign soon.
That leaves Klaus.
He has not said if he will sign the treaty, which has been
approved by the Czech parliament, although analysts believe he
will in the end.
The follower of the free-market Austrian economic school
believes the EU is on a dangerous path to ever more regulation,
less freedom and less accountability.
"Europeism is, for me, an inconsistent, evidently
heterogeneous, but in principle neosocialist, doctrine which
characterizes the current thinking in Europe," Klaus, 68, said
in August. "It believes neither in freedom nor in spontaneous
evolution of human society."
The EU benefits leftists and Brussels bureaucrats, Klaus has
said, calling it a "romantic utopianism, not shared by Europe's
silent majority, but predominantly by European elites".
The Czech president does not have much in the way of
executive power but must sign international treaties.
His vision is of a different Europe, a free-trade zone based
on cooperation between national governments.
Klaus's opponents, the vast majority of the Czech political
scene including his former party, think the Lisbon Treaty is
either beneficial or at least a price worth paying for being
part of the European Union.
Klaus jumped from a low-level job at the state bank to
become the Czechoslovak finance minister after the 1989 'Velvet
Revolution' and later the Czech prime minister in 1992.
Under his leadership, the country navigated price
liberalisation and restructuring and the split of the federation
into independent Czech Republic and Slovakia.
But from then on, criticism of his policies grew. Critics
blamed his privatisation scheme and rejection of capital market
regulation for large-scale theft at companies.
A currency crisis and a sharp downturn in 1997, along with a
party financing scandal, toppled Klaus as prime minister.
He came back as president in 2003, replacing Vaclav Havel,
the former dissident playwright who led the overthrow of
communism. This was a great satisfaction to Klaus, who had been
trying to rise level with Havel, his rival since the early days
of the transformation.
On the foreign policy front, Klaus had a brush with the
United States over the war in Iraq, which Havel had supported.
He raised an anti-German tone in one of his election
campaigns, and has had more ear for Russia than Havel. Last
year, he did not join a chorus of condemnation of Russia's war
with Georgia.
Klaus rarely misses an opportunity to provoke controversy.
He has called the fight against global warming a dangerous
religion. "Communism has been replaced by the threat of
ambitious environmentalism," he wrote to the U.S. Congress in
2007. If the planet was warming, which he said was far from
certain, we should adapt rather than regulate and cut growth,
Klaus said.
He has also gone as far as to rank sports and food on the
right-left scale. Snowboards, bottled water and backpacks are
leftist. So is salad. Right-wingers ski and eat chocolate cream.
