What Can the President Do? Czech President’s Role in Creations and Falls of Cabinets

The Czech constitution grants the president a key role in the beginning of the process of forming a new cabinet, but its text is very brief, and above all it can be interpreted in different ways. In political practice, this situation has allowed presidents to act actively and test the possible boundaries of asserting their ideas. This resulted in numerous conflicts with party leaders and public controversies over the president’s excessive activism. The paper compares the three presidents up to now: Václav Havel, Václav Klaus, and Miloš Zeman, showing the differences that can be distinguished among them. The paper also includes an analysis of the presidents’ influence on termination of cabinets, where their constitutional possibilities were much more limited. We can however identify several cases when the president considerably contributed to the fall of a cabinet. Special attention is paid to the question how the transition from indirect to direct presidential election at the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century was reflected in the president’s actions.