The first government of Vladimír Mečiar was in power in Slovakia from 27 June 1990 to 22 April 1991. The future controversial political forces in it were still mixed with the idealists of the former Public Against Violence. However, many of the figures of the Velvet Revolution were not ready to assume political power, and so a number of personalities were shut out from access to the executive in a short period.
Between 23 April 1991 and 24 June 1992, Mečiar was briefly replaced by Ján Čarnogurský, whose cabinet, however, served only as a transit apparatus during the division of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and prepared the elections to the Slovak National Council, which Mečiar’s Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) won.
The visions of Václav Havel and Václav Klaus and the communists who were ready for change
After the collapse of the socialist system, a number of opportunities for civil society, new state building and entrepreneurship opened up in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Of course, it depended on the social background, the historical experiences of the family, etc., with which a person came into contact, but let us now try to define certain lines of thought that determined what individual groups of the population expected from the new situation. We have to ignore one group who basically did not care and for whom the changes that occurred on their journey between home, work, self-service and returning home were just a meaningless backdrop and did not care about the deeper ideas of turning totalitarianism into democracy and the rule of law. Setting this group aside, three trends were taking shape in public affairs.
Havel’s ideas of civil society
The model of the organisation of society according to the first post-revolutionary president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, was of course based on the consistent anchoring of the rule of law and the rules for pluralistic democracy. However, he wanted to build a structure of relations called civil society between the human being, as an individual who puts his vote in the ballot box, is a workforce or an entrepreneur, and the state, which arranges services for the people. Any kind of formal or informal association was consistently suppressed under the communists. But Václav Havel’s incredible foresight saw in a broad-based civil society a certain immunity that could protect the whole system of social organization. The speeches in which Havel discussed these ideas have lost none of their relevance, even decades after they were delivered. On the contrary, these ideas seem to revive with every crisis and every upheaval.
Havel’s ideas were not only directed at associations in the sense of gardeners, model makers or ornamenters of a certain environment, which in itself is not unimportant. His ideas were not based on the model of two or more political parties dominating state power. They rested on the possibility of certain pervasive, idea-driven political entities that would be able not only to generate personalities in the political strata, but also to withdraw them in the event of failure.
In contrast, Václav Klaus’s ideas were based on the super-liberal mechanisms of the market and the strong anchoring of political parties. His views on Havel’s ideas of civil society were, to put it politely, strongly rejected.
And then there’s the third group. This was the class of communist leaders who were surprisingly well prepared for the new situation. Many of them were clearly preparing for the fall of the regime on the basis of several signs. Others understood it only after the collapse itself, but the starting line had been moved miles ahead of their hitherto unknown competition. This group included, in particular, representatives of foreign trade enterprises and the exporters; both groups were discussed in chapter zero.
