Václav Klaus (born 19 June 1941 in Prague) is the second President of the Czech Republic (since 2003) and a former Prime Minister (1992–1997).
An economist, Klaus was the principal co-founder of the Civic Democratic Party, the Czech Republic's largest center-right political party. Klaus is a eurosceptic, but he reluctantly endorsed the Lisbon treaty as President of his country. He has been called the "Margaret Thatcher of Central Europe".
Early Life
Klaus grew up in the large (up to 1948 middle-class) Vinohrady neighborhood of Prague. He studied what was then called "economics of foreign trade" and graduated from the University of Economics, Prague in 1963. He also spent some time at universities in Italy (1966) and at Cornell University in the United States in 1969.
He then pursued a postgraduate academic career at the State Institute of Economics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, which he was forced to leave in 1970. However, he soon obtained a position in the Czechoslovak State Bank, where he held various staff positions from 1971 to 1986. It was reported that he obtained a limited permission to travel mainly to so-called socialist foreign countries. This might have been a small privilege at that time. In 1987, Klaus joined the Institute for Prognostics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.
Personal Life
Václav Klaus is married to Livia Klausová, who is a Slovak by origin and an economist. They have two sons, Václav (a private secondary school headmaster) and Jan (an economist), and five grandchildren.
It has been claimed that Klaus had several extramarital affairs. The first alleged relationship might have been in 1991 with Eva Svobodová. In summer 2002, Klaus was photographed by a tabloid as having a "special relationship" with 24-year-old economy student Klára Lohniská. One paper claimed he spent the night after his second presidential inauguration (7 March 2008) with 25-year-old Petra Bednářová. The alleged extramarital affairs, if they have occurred, had no lasting impact on his married life.
From : www.wikipedia.org
