Valtr Komárek

Valtr Komárek (born August 10, 1930 in Hodonín , † May 16, 2013 in Prague ) was a Czech economist, forecaster and politician. He was honorary chairman of the Czech Social Democratic Party . After the Velvet Revolution , Komárek was the first vice-chairman of the Marián Čalfa I government .

Career

Valtr Komárek was born to Jewish parents; his parents did not survive the concentration camp. He himself survived the concentration camp because he was able to escape and then hid until the liberation of Czechoslovakia. After the war he joined the KSČ and studied economics, including in Moscow . He then worked for the State Planning Commission of the ČSSR . 1964–1967 he stayed in Cuba, where he advised the incumbent Industry Minister Che Guevara . Within the economic politicians in the KSČ, he was one of the reformers around Ota Šik who wanted to implement a socialist market economy in the course of the reforms of the Prague Spring . In the spring of 1968 he became General Secretary of the Economic Council of the ČSSR, but in 1971 after the fall of the Prague Spring he was transferred to the customs administration. In 1978 he became a research assistant at the Academy of Sciences and in 1984 director of the prognostic office of the Academy of Sciences. Here he worked with the future Czech President Miloš Zeman .

In the course of the Velvet Revolution he was appointed deputy head of government in the Czechoslovak interim government under Marián Čalfa in December 1989 ( Marián Čalfa I government ), which held office until the first free parliamentary elections in 1990. Komárek resigned from the KSČ and was elected to the Czechoslovak parliament in 1990 for the Občanské fórum (citizens' forum). In 1991 he joined the social democratic ČSSD as a member of the social democratic ČSSD in the course of the dissolution of the Citizens Forum and was the party's top candidate in the Czechoslovak parliamentary elections in 1992, in which he was able to defend his mandate. In the course of the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on January 1, 1993, the mandate expired. Komárek then withdrew from political life. In 2011 he was elected honorary chairman of the ČSSD.

Komárek died on May 16, 2013 after complications after heart surgery in Prague.

Web links

• Literature and other media by and about Valtr Komárek in the catalog of the National Library of the Czech Republic
• Reform communist and vice-premier from 1989 Valtr Komárek has died
• On the death of the reform communist Komárek , obituary from Radio Prague on May 20, 2013, accessed on May 20, 2013
• Czech reform communist Valtr Komarek died europeonline-magazine, May 16, 2013.