Petr Pavel, 61, will take over as head of state Milos Zeman, a controversial politician, who had close ties with Moscow before flip-flopping when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. .
LGeneral Petr Pavel, former head of NATO’s Military Committee and a supporter of military aid to Ukraine, was elected president of the Czech Republic on Saturday, beating former Prime Minister Andrej Babis to take the succession of Milos Zeman, who had maintained ambiguous ties with Moscow.
Mr Pavel, a 61-year-old retired paratrooper and general who was leading in opinion polls ahead of the vote, won the run-off election with more than 57.4% of the vote to 42.6% for Mr. Babis, according to partial results after counting 93% of the ballots.
Turnout in the EU and NATO member country of 10.5 million people was 70% following an acrimonious campaign marred by controversy, including over Ukraine.
Petr Pavel, 61, will take over as head of state Milos Zeman, a controversial politician, who had close ties with Moscow before flip-flopping when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. .
He had already beaten Mr. Babis in the first round of the ballot, a fortnight ago, obtaining 35.4% of the vote against 35%.
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The campaign between the two rounds was bitter, with a wave of misinformation that largely targeted Mr. Pavel, and death threats that targeted Mr. Babis and his family.
Andrej Babis, a billionaire, has sought to woo voters worried about the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by hinting that his opponent could drag the country into that war. The populist MP also said he would not send Czech troops to help Poland or the Baltics as part of NATO’s collective defense — a statement that raised questions abroad, and which he immediately returned to.
Although his role is essentially ceremonial in the Czech Republic, the head of state appoints the government, chooses the governor of the central bank and the constitutional judges, and assumes supreme command of the armed forces.
EU, NATO, Ukraine
Pavel will be the fourth president of the Czech Republic since it became an independent state after a peaceful split with Slovakia in 1993, four years after Czechoslovakia abandoned its totalitarian communist rule, falling out of Moscow’s orbit.
His predecessors were Vaclav Havel, an anti-communist dissident playwright who led the country in 1993-2003, economist Vaclav Klaus (2003-2013) and Milos Zeman, whose last term expires in March.
Petr Pavel, 61, is a hero of the war in the former Yugoslavia during which he notably helped to free French soldiers. He then became Chief of the Czech General Staff, and from 2015 to 2018 held the post of Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, the highest post of military official in the Atlantic Alliance.
The two rivals had been members of the Communist Party in the 1980s, when Czechoslovakia was under Moscow’s tutelage.
But the former elite paratrooper with the neatly trimmed white beard and white hair has since become an ardent defender of his country’s membership of the European Union and NATO.
“The Czech Republic is a sovereign state and a full (EU and NATO) member, so we can’t just sit quietly, nod and criticize the results. We need to be more active and, at the same time, constructive.”
He promised to be an independent president, uninfluenced by party politics, to continue supporting aid to war-torn Ukraine, and to support kyiv’s bid to join the EU.
“Naturally, Ukraine must first meet all the conditions to become a member, such as progress in the fight against corruption. But I think she has the right to have the same chances that we had in the past,” he said.
