Ing. Milos Zeman

Milos Zeman was born in Kolin, Central Bohemia, on September 28, 1944. After his school leaving examination at a commercial high school, he was denied, for political reasons, access to any university-level education. It took four years before he was able to start extramural studies at the Prague School of Economics, from which he graduated in 1969.

During the Prague Spring of 1968, Mr.Zeman joined Dubcek's Communist Party, but after the occupation of Czechoslovakia he was expelled from the Party because of his scathing criticism of the incoming regime of so-called "normalization". In July 1968 he applied for membership of the re-emerging Social Democratic Party but the regime of the day prevented its restoration, and Mr.Zeman was consequently hard put to find employment. During the next fourteen years, he worked in a physical education organization where he developed a centre for prognostication. ¨The centre was closed down in 1984 for its critical studies of social developments in the country. Mr.Zeman then found employment at an agricultural organization where, however, the same situation arose again, and he was dismissed in 1989. Throughout this period, he was engaged in the prognostic modelling of social systems. During the1989 revolution, he joined the Civic Forum and became actively involved in its centre-left stream. Mr.Zeman was elected to the Federal Assembly in 1990, and became the chairman of its budget committee. He kept in close touch with the Members' Group of Social Democratic Orientation. He joined the CSSD (Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party as it then was) and was re-elected to the Federal Assembly of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic in the elections held that year. In 1992 he was also elected Chairman of the CSSD Prague Municipal Committee. At the 1993 national Congress of the CSSD (Czech Social Democratic Party as it is now) in Hradec Kralove, Mr.Zeman was elected Party Chairman and subsequently confirmed in this position at the Party congresses of 1995 and 1997.

In the 1996 general election, he was elected in the North Moravian constituency to the Chamber of Deputies of the CR Parliament and became its Chairman (Speaker) on June 27, 1996.

In the early election to the Chamber of Deputies of the CR Parliament in June 1998, Mr.Zeman was re-elected in the North Moravian constituency, and was appointed Prime Minister of the Government of the Czech Republic on July 17, 1998.

Mr. Zeman is married to his wife Ivana; their daughter, Katerina, was born in 1993. Mr. Zeman also has a son, David, from his first marriage.

FastCounter by LinkExchange