Former President Václav Klaus disagrees with a competence lawsuit against President Miloš Zeman, which the new prime minister, Petr Fiala, intends to file over Zeman’s refusal to approve Fiala’s pick for finance minister. According to Klaus, conflicts in politics should not be resolved through courts but by compromise and agreement.
Zeman confirmed on Friday that he did not want to appoint Jan Lipavský from the Pirates as foreign minister. He pointed to his insufficient qualification and lackluster stance towards Israel and the Visegrád Four allied countries of Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia.
“I know very well from my own presidential and prime ministerial experiences that the government is appointed in our country as a result of communication between the president and the prime minister. We do not have a presidential system, so the government cannot be dictated by the president, nor do we have a prime ministerial-chancellor system in which the government is dictated by the prime minister,” noted Klaus.
“Our system is different and requires an agreement between the president and the prime minister. The prime minister does not dictate but proposes. Our constitution does not say that the president must accept this proposal,” he added.
“It is undignified for a political problem that requires a compromise to be translated into a lawsuit. That is not the way things should be resolved in politics. It is a complete degradation of politics and the political system,” said Klaus, who also thinks that Jan Lipavský is not a good candidate for the ministerial post.
Klaus: Lipavský has a questionable qualification
Klaus wonders if those criticizing President Zeman’s standpoint do not mind that Lipavský has a questionable qualification for the post.
“Do they not mind, for example, that Mr. Lipavský wants the next Sudeten German Days to take place in the Czech Republic? I do mind,” the former president agrees with Miloš Zeman.
“When Chancellor Kohl and I signed the Czech-German Declaration in 1997, we did not anticipate anything like this at the time,” he adds.
In the past, Václav Klaus himself went through the process of appointing a government several times, both as president and prime minister.
