It’s not the eccentric kind to jump on the table, rather the opposite. Petr Fiala, 57, is a serious man, a little austere, with an intellectual look, a bit like the Third Republic in France, round glasses, beard always carefully trimmed. On this Friday, July 1, he obviously made the headlines in the Czech press: for example, the daily Pravo showed him on the front page, alongside Emmanuel Macron.
It is no coincidence that Fiala has an intellectual look, it is. After studying history, literature and political science, he became university rector, and he only entered politics in 2011, at the age of 46. He then made a career in a conservative right-wing party, the ODS, the civic democratic party. His feat of arms is to have built a rather center-right coalition which overthrew populist billionaire Andrej Babis last fall. Father of 3 children, Petr Fiala is a practicing Catholic, rather a rarity in a country of 10 million inhabitants – the Czech Republic – where religious practice has declined considerably. Fiala therefore has the reputation of being a little dull, of lacking charisma, but also of knowing how to build compromises, of liking to negotiate. It can be useful on the European scene.
He has his work cut out for him, with Ukraine at the top of the list, which obviously promises to be the big chunk of his six-month presidency, until the end of the year. The Czech Republic has the advantage of being very close to Ukraine – only 400 kilometers separate them – and of being at the heart of Eastern Europe, between Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria and Germany. Prague will have to settle the questions of energy independence as a priority: how to ensure that the 27 will be able to do without Russian gas by next winter. And the Czech Republic is well placed to measure the problem: it imports more than 80% of its gas from Russia.
Petr Fiala got to work on the morning of July 1: he welcomes all the European Commissioners in a castle in the center of the country, in Litomysi. And he promises a summit in October, to take stock of the reception of Ukrainian refugees – nearly 8 million, we recall, including 400,000 in the Czech Republic. And also to advance Ukraine’s candidacy for Europe, without forgetting also the candidacies of the Balkan countries, North Macedonia and Albania. Finally, the last topics on the menu for this semester of the Czech presidency: cybersecurity and the management of artificial intelligence.
The menu is therefore plentiful, and Prague does not only have assets. There are several pitfalls. The Czech Republic is a fairly Eurosceptic country: only a large third of the population trusts the European institutions. The country is not part of the Euro zone, so that limits its power of economic action. And Fiala tends to spare its Hungarian and Polish neighbors on crucial issues of the rule of law, which can create tensions with the founding members of Western Europe. But in any case, the course of this Czech presidency will first of all depend on an external parameter over which it will have little control, which is of course the evolution of the war in Ukraine.