Jan Zahradil

Jan Zahradil (2014)

Jan Zahradil (born March 30, 1963 in Prague ) is a Czech politician of the conservative party ODS . He has been a member of the European Parliament since 2004 and was Chairman of the Group of European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) from 2011 to 2014 . Since 2009 he has also been president of the associated European party Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists (AECR). Before that, he was a member of the Czech House of Representatives from 1998 to 2004 and Deputy Chairman of the ODS from 2001 to 2004.

Life and political career

Zahradil studied at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague , where he graduated in 1987 and worked as a research assistant until 1992. He was involved in the Velvet Revolution and from 1990 to 1992 a member of the Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia and advisor to the Foreign Minister. From 1995 to 1997 he was foreign policy advisor to the then Czech Prime Minister Václav Klaus . From 1998 to 2004 he was a member of the Czech House of Representatives , where he was initially deputy chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and later of the Committee on Europe. In 2002/03 he was a member of the European Convention that drafted the EU Constitutional Treaty.

In 2001, Zahradil was elected vice chairman of the ODS. After he ran unsuccessfully for the office of party chairman in 2002, he received the newly created office of first deputy chairman. He held this office until 2004.

After the Czech EU accession Zahradil was in the 2004 European elections in the European Parliament voted, where he was head of the ODS delegation. As a member of the European Democrats (ED), this initially belonged to the EPP-ED Group . After the European elections in 2009 , in which Zahradil was re-elected, the ED left the joint group to form the new European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group with various other parties . Members of the group also set up a political party at European level , the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists (AECR), of which Zahradil became chair. He was also deputy chairman of the parliamentary group. After the previous group leader Michał Kamiński resigned from this post, Zahradil was elected as his successor on March 8, 2011. He prevailed against Timothy Kirkhope with 33 to 18 votes. After the 2014 European elections , Zahradil handed over the chairmanship to Syed Kamall from Britain .

EU Parliament from 2009 to 2014

During the 2009-2014 legislative period, Zahradil was a member of the Committee on International Trade and the Delegation to the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee as well as a deputy member of the Development Committee , the Subcommittee on Human Rights , the Delegation to the Parliamentary Committee Cariforum-EU and the Delegation in of the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly.

Political positions

Zahradil is close to Václav Klaus and is a leading member of the Eurosceptic wing within the ODS. He is also known as a "climate skeptic" , in 2007 he campaigned for the spread of the film The Great Global Warming Swindle . In 2019, however, he relativized this position and said he was not a climate skeptic. He "does not deny that CO2 and other man-made greenhouse gases cause climate change".