Ugly Cohabitation in Czechia – INTERVIEW

We sat down with Pavel Havlíček, a Visegrad Insight Fellow from Czechia, to discuss how bad the clash between Petr Macinka and Petr Pavel can get.

Pavel Havlíček is a 2021/2022 Marcin Król Fellow at Visegrad Insight. He is also a Research Fellow at the Association for International Affairs (AMO) Research Centre. His research focus is on Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine and Russia, and the Eastern Partnership. Read Pavel’s articles here.

Wojciech Przybylski: At the end of January we covered a spat between Czechia’s Foreign Minister Petr Macinka and President Petr Pavel in our Weekly Outlook and the editorial analysis that followed. President Pavel accused the foreign minister of blackmail and said he expected a criminal investigation into extortion. Macinka allegedly used SMS messages to put pressure on one of the president’s advisors, threatening to ‘destroy’ the president. Pavel, could you explain the context, the meaning of these actions and how events have unfolded in the Czech Republic since then?

Pavel Havlíček: You have outlined the bigger picture. We have seen tensions building for weeks – since the elections in early October. But things exploded on Tuesday, 27 January, when the presidential office held an emergency press conference. Pavel revealed the specific Signal messages exchanged between Foreign Minister Petr Macinka and Petr Kolář, an advisor at Prague Castle. This was the channel the foreign ministry used to apply pressure.