The joy in Central Europe with a European soul at the election of Petr Pavel as president of the Czech Republic the day before yesterday was such that his counterpart from neighboring Slovakia, Zuzana Caputová, went to Prague on the same Saturday to congratulate him. Petr Pavel, 61, a former general with high positions in the national army and in NATO, who was contesting the polls as an independent, will be elected president until March 8, when the term of the current head of state, the controversial Milos Zeman. During his ten years in Prague Castle, Zeman leaned toward China and Russia, and did not renege on Putin until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine eleven months ago.
But the joy in Bratislava and in Brussels – the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, congratulated him via Twitter – goes further. There is relief because the victory of the ex-soldier came to the detriment of the populist tycoon and former prime minister Andrej Babis – defeated in the second round of the elections by 58.32% compared to 41.67% -, and because Pavel proclaims his Europeanist, Atlanticist position and support for Ukraine.
“I welcome your strong commitment to our European values. His experience in security, defense and foreign relations will be invaluable in maintaining and strengthening Europe’s unity in support of Ukraine,” Von der Leyen tweeted on Saturday. The two had a telephone conversation yesterday, and she invited him to travel to Brussels. “I am glad that in this Central European space the number of heads of state who venerate democratic values ??is increasing,” said Slovakia’s top president, Zuzana Caputová, on Saturday in Prague.
Petr Pavel announced that his first trips as president will be to Slovakia and Ukraine, and also to Poland to assure Polish President Andrzej Duda that the Czech Republic will respect its commitments to NATO and the alliance’s principle of collective defense, something that its rival Babis had called into question. Ukrainian leader Volodimir Zelensky congratulated him in Czech via Twitter: “I appreciate your support for Ukraine and our fight against Russian aggression. I look forward to our close personal cooperation for the benefit of the peoples of Ukraine and the Czech Republic and in the interest of a united Europe.”
Former elite paratrooper, Petr Pavel (Planá, near Marienbad, 1961) cemented his military career in the eighties in what was then Czechoslovakia, as a member of the Communist Party, something for which he has been criticized and which he considers a youthful mistake. As he has said in various interviews, at that time he saw party membership as an inseparable part of his service as a soldier.
After the fall of the communist regime in 1989, came the agreed division of the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, political changes through which Pavel went through, becoming a firm supporter of joining the EU and NATO. “There is no better alternative,” he wrote on his electoral website. Within the Visegrad Group (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary), he has been critical of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán. Pavel advocates adopting the euro as a currency and supports same-sex marriage.
As a lieutenant colonel, Petr Pavel participated in the UN mission in the wars in Yugoslavia, and in 1993 helped evacuate surrounded French soldiers, for which he was decorated by France. He later became chief of the Czech general staff, and from 2015 to 2018 chairman of the NATO military committee, the alliance’s highest military post. That year he retired.
According to analysts, Pavel’s experience in military diplomacy and foreign policy will be his great asset in the position, which, although it is mostly ceremonial, is a speaker of the country’s mood. The position includes the appointment of the Government, and the appointment of the governor of the central bank and the judges of the Constitutional Court, in addition to the supreme command of the armed forces. His choice was welcomed by the pro-Western, center-right government of Petr Fiala, which supplies military and humanitarian aid to Kyiv.
