Retired general Petr Pavel defeated populist billionaire Andrej Babis in a runoff vote to become the new president of the Czech Republic.
Pavel will succeed controversy-courting Milos Zeman in the largely ceremonial but prestigious post.
“My presidency will succeed only when we all succeed together,” Pavel told a cheering crowd of his supporters.
With the ballots from 97% of almost 15,000 polling stations counted by the Czech Statistics Office, Pavel had 57.8% of the vote compared with 42.2% for Babis.
Pavel is a former chairman of NATO’s military committee, the alliance’s highest military body.
Who is Petr Pavel?
Petr Pavel was born in 1961 in Planá near Mariánské Lázně (Marienbad) in western Bohemia. To a certain extent, his professional career was predetermined – his father was already a high-ranking officer and Pavel began his education at the military high school in Opava as a teenager. He then studied at the Army Military Academy in Vyškov. From 1983 he served with the paratroopers in Prostějov, Moravia, and later rose to command the elite unit. During this time, however, he also became a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (1985-1989), which many people accused him of during the election campaign.
Party membership and agent school before 1989
Looking back, Pavel regrets his party membership, explaining it with naivety and a lack of interest in politics. He saw them as an indispensable condition for an officer’s career. Pavel said to the weekly newspaper “Respect”: “The alternative was not to be in the paratroopers and therefore not in the army, but that was out of the question for me. I didn’t know any other environment, I grew up in this environment and was brought up.” He explained on Czech Radio: “We knew things were given and it makes no sense to deal with them in any special way.”
Shortly before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Pavel was sent to a military intelligence school. He was to be trained there to become an agent who, if necessary, could penetrate behind enemy lines – meaning NATO states, i.e. today’s allies – and “liquidate” the enemy there. His good knowledge of English also stood him in good stead. Former comrades report that Pavel always had slips of paper with English vocabulary in his uniform pockets when he was with the paratroopers, used every free minute to study and was even smiled at for that. To this day he is said to regularly read the Kindle edition of the British weekly The Economist.
Steep rise after 1989
After the Velvet Revolution, good English skills, which few had at the time, provided another career boost: Pavel was employed in the Czech General Staff, where he held various posts and was sent to courses in Great Britain and the USA in the 1990s. Since the brief interlude in the former Yugoslavia, he hasn’t been an ordinary soldier “crawling in the mud,” but rather a “military diplomat,” as Czech journalist and defense expert Jan Gazdík said in “Podcast 5:59” on the Seznam Zprávy web platform. Contacts from the Yugoslavia mission and from the foreign courses helped him on his way up.
Diplomacy school at NATO
Another career boost for Pavel was the Czech entry into NATO in 1999. In the following decade he held various positions as a representative and liaison officer for the Czech army in foreign countries and in NATO. From 2012 to 2015 he was Chief of the General Staff of the Czech Army, then until 2018 Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, the highest military position in the western defense alliance. Pavel was the first military from a former Warsaw Pact state to hold them.
It was an extremely valuable experience for the incoming president. “It is a very important diplomatic function, in which the official acts primarily as a mediator and, to put it simply, tries to find a consensus and bring about a joint decision,” explains defense expert Gazdík. “It’s an extremely good school. Probably no other Czech politician, soldier and diplomat has such extensive diplomatic and negotiating practice.”
Political positions of Petr Pavel
Petr Pavel considers his priorities to be an active foreign policy, energy independence (which is why he welcomes the classification of nuclear energy as a green energy Source), an innovative economy with higher added value, a healthy environment and education. He also wants to be a president who settles disputes and would not veto the opening of marriage for same-sex couples. He supports the introduction of the euro but would not push for a specific date. This is “better for our people and our economy,” he wrote in a leaflet in the run-up to the second ballot, but at the same time conceded: “The introduction of the euro is not on the agenda and it’s not the president who decides about it.”/ /Compiled from newswires
