Volume 45, Number 4 · March 5, 1998
The Sad State of the Republic
By Václav Havel
Last November, the Czech government, led by Prime Minister Václav Klaus, was forced to resign in the wake of allegations that, among other things, the Civic Democratic Party, led by Klaus, had access to a slush fund held in an unauthorized Swiss bank account. In the period between those resignations and the appointment of an interim government, President Havel, who had recently been released from the hospital and was recuperating from pneumonia, delivered what is, in effect, a state of the union speech to the Parliament and Senate of the Czech Republic on December 9. His address, translated below, was interpreted in much of the Czech press as an attack on Klaus's policies. But more than that, it presents an aspect of Havel rarely seen in his speeches abroad. It reaffirms, in the theater of domestic politics, his longstanding belief in the importance of the institutions of civil society.
Feature, 5907 words
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