Jan Ruml
Jan Ruml (born March 5, 1953 in Prague ) is a Czech politician and journalist. In the ČSSR he was a dissident , during the Velvet Revolution he was a co-founder of the Citizens' Forum and the resulting ODS party . From 1992 to 1997 he was the Czech Minister of the Interior. In 1998 he founded the liberal Unie svobody (Freedom Union), of which he was chairman until 1999. From 1998 to 2004 Ruml was a member of the Czech Senate.
Life
As the son of journalist and dissident Jiří Ruml, Ruml was unable to study after graduating from high school in 1972 and worked as a worker until 1989. Like his father, he was active as a dissident and was one of the signatories of Charter 77 . In 1987/88 Ruml was one of the founders of the opposition newspaper Lidové noviny , which was produced and distributed underground as samizdat .
During the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Ruml was involved in the citizens ' forum . He helped found the magazine Respekt and was its first editor-in-chief in 1990. From April to June 1990 he headed the civil counter-espionage (Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Democracy, ÚOÚD) of Czechoslovakia, which was formed after the dissolution of the Czechoslovak State Security (StB). He was also the Deputy Minister of the Interior of the ČSFR and in 1991 he participated in the establishment of Občanská Demokratieická strana (ODS). In June 1992 he was elected to the national chamber of the Czechoslovak federal parliament, which only met until the end of the year. At the same time he took over the office of Czech Interior Minister in the government of Václav Klaus , which he kept after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993. Ruml was elected to the Czech Chamber of Deputies in 1996 , and he also remained Minister of the Interior.
In the fall of 1997, an intra-party conflict broke out within the ODS in connection with a party donation affair. Ruml, together with the deputy party chairman Ivan Pilip, sharply criticized the party chairman and Prime Minister Václav Klaus and called for his resignation. Klaus in turn tried to dismiss Ruml as minister, which initially failed due to the resistance of President Václav Havel and only took place on November 7, 1997 with a delay. After the coalition partners ODA and KDU-CSL left the government because of the internal party dispute between the ODS, the entire cabinet finally resigned. At the early ODS party congress on December 19, 1997, Ruml's attempt to replace Klaus as party chairman failed. He then formed his own platform together with Ivan Pilip and a group of MPs loyal to him, who, unlike Klaus' supporters, took part in the Josef Tošovský government . From this platform, Ruml and Ivan Pilip founded the Unie svobody (Freedom Union) shortly afterwards , and he was elected its first chairman.
The Freedom Union achieved 8.6% of the vote in the early parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic in 1998 and Ruml was confirmed as a member of parliament. He refused to work with the election winner, the social democratic ČSSD , which then concluded an opposition agreement with the ODS due to the lack of coalition alternatives . The US then formed a counter-alliance with the DEU, the ODA and the KDU-ČSL to form the so-called coalition of four . Ruml resigned his parliamentary mandate in autumn 1998 after he had been elected as a representative of the Prague 6 district in the Senate , the upper house of the Czech Parliament. At the end of 1999, however, Ruml gave up the chairmanship of the US party on the grounds that he was jointly responsible for the mutual blockades in Czech politics. In 1999-2004 he studied law and graduated with a master's degree. Ruml criticized the Freedom Union's participation in the coalition with the ČSSD from 2002 and resigned from the party in 2004. He was unable to defend his Senate mandate in the election that same year.
In 2010 he joined the Green Party, Strana zelených (SZ), which he left in 2014. In October 2018 Ruml was elected as a district councilor of Prague 2 as a non-party member.
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| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ruml, Jan |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Czech politician, former Minister of the Interior, member of the Chamber of Deputies, Senator |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 5, 1953 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Prague |