Vladimír Mečiar

Vladimír Mečiar (; born 26 July 1942) is a Slovak politician who served as the prime minister of Slovakia three times, from 1990 to 1991, from 1992 to 1994 and from 1994 to 1998. He was the leader of the People's Party - Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (ĽS-HZDS). Mečiar led Slovakia during the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992–93 and was one of the leading presidential candidates in Slovakia in 1999 and 2004. He has been criticized by his opponents as well as by Western political organisations for having an autocratic style of administration and for his connections to organized crime and his years in government became infamously known as ''Mečiarizmus'' (Mečiarism - spin off from Communism, due to its autocracy).

Czechoslovakia

Mečiar was born in Detva in 1942 as the eldest of four boys. His father was a tailor, and his mother a housewife. His wife Margita is a medical doctor and they have three children. Starting in the Communist Party of Slovakia, the only road to prominence in Communist Czechoslovakia, he became committee chairman in the town of Žiar nad Hronom, only to be dismissed in the year after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, when he delivered a pro-reform speech to the national congress in 1969 and was thrown out. A year later he was also expelled from the Communist Party and then added to the Communist Party Central Committee's long list of enemies of the socialist regime. He put himself through the Faculty of Law of the Comenius University while working in a glass factory.

In late 1989, during the fast-paced anti-Communist Velvet Revolution, he joined the new political party, Public Against Violence (Verejnosť proti násiliu, VPN), which was the Slovak counterpart to the better-known Czech Civic Forum. On 11 January 1990, when the VPN was looking for professionals to participate in the government of Slovakia, Mečiar was appointed as Minister of the Interior and Environment of Slovakia on a recommendation of Alexander Dubček, who was impressed by Mečiar's thorough knowledge in all relevant fields.

After the first democratic elections in Czechoslovakia in June 1990, he was named Slovak prime minister (representing the VPN) of a coalition government of VPN and the Christian Democratic Movement. He advocated economic reform and continued federation with the Czechs.

In 1990 the political landscape of the Czech Republic and Slovakia started to develop and many new political parties were formed, mainly from the Civic Forum and the VPN. By the end of 1990, some of Mečiar's partners in the VPN began distancing themselves from him. First, the party split into two fractions in early March 1991: Mečiar supporters (mostly members of his cabinet) and Mečiar opponents (led by the VPN chairman Fedor Gál). On 23 April 1991, the Presidium of the Slovak parliament ( Slovak National Council) deposed him as premier of Slovakia and he was replaced by Ján Čarnogurský, the leader of the Christian Democratic Movement. Three days later, the VPN officially split in two: the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) and the remaining VPN (since October 1991 called ODÚ-VPN, later just ODÚ). Mečiar was elected HZDS chairman in June 1991.

Dissolution of Czechoslovakia

In 1991 and 1992, there were frequent, but fruitless, negotiations between the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic concerning the future relations between the two constituent republics of Czechoslovakia. The winners of the June 1992 elections in Czechoslovakia and new prime ministers were the Civic Democratic Party led by Václav Klaus in the Czech Republic and the HZDS led by Vladimír Mečiar in Slovakia. Before and shortly after this election, the HZDS supported the creation of a looser federation—a confederation—between the two republics. However, its Czech counterpart wanted an even more centralized Czechoslovakia than was the case in 1992 or two separate countries. Since these two concepts were irreconcilable, Mečiar and Klaus agreed (after intense negotiations, but without having consulted the population in a referendum) on 23 July in Bratislava to dissolve Czechoslovakia and to create two independent states. As a result, Mečiar and Klaus became the prime ministers of two independent states on 1 January 1993. Mečiar also opposed the free-market shock therapy proposed by Prague and Klaus' party to all of Czechoslovakia.

Slovakia

After eight members of the parliament left the HZDS in March 1993, Mečiar lost his parliamentary majority. At the same time Mečiar's HZDS also lost the support of the president, Michal Kováč, who was originally nominated by the HZDS. However, it was only in March 1994 that he was unseated as prime minister by the parliament (National Council of the Slovak Republic) and the opposition parties created a new government under Jozef Moravčík's lead. However, after the elections held at the turn of September and October 1994, in which his HZDS won 35% of the votes, he became prime minister again — in a coalition with the far-right Slovak National Party headed by the controversial Ján Slota

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