In the flying circus that is the European Union, the merry-go-round presidency has now stopped at the Czechs. Enter Vaclav Klaus.

Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, in May 2008. (Kevin Wolf/Associated Press)

Klaus, 67, is the president of the Czech Republic. He is also a loud and cantankerous Euro-skeptic.

He refuses to fly the EU flag over Prague Castle, the seat of the Czech presidency. He also makes startling, and disobliging comparisons between the European Union and the old Soviet Union and its captive empire.

Indeed, he once told a British politician, "whenever I look at the Berlaymont building (the headquarters of the European Commission) in Brussels, I seem to see the word Comecon," a reference to the free-trade area set up by Moscow to include its Eastern European satellites.

The Czechs, of course, are very junior members of the 27-country EU, having joined, with nine others, less than five years ago. But as the EU presidency jumps from country to country every six months, it was bound to be the Czechs turn at some point.

On Jan. 1, their number came up and Vaclav Klaus is now at the centre of the structure of modern-day Europe, a structure he happens to despise.

A rejected genius

In Canadian terms, it is a bit as if the leader of the Bloc Québecois were suddenly vaulted into a position where his pronouncements and decisions would have an important influence on the structure he is dedicated to dismantling.

Political fiction of course. Coalition-wary Canadians are much too careful. (Aren't they?)

But back to Europe and Klaus. How did someone so chary manage to make it to the top of heap? Self-belief helped, self-belief in generous portions.

"His behaviour and attitudes reveal that he feels like a rejected genius," someone once said of him. "He shows that whoever does not agree with his views is stupid and incompetent."

That rather admiring portrait was penned a quarter of a century ago when Klaus was giving clandestine economic seminars extolling free-market economics in what was then Communist Czechoslovakia.

The author of the quote was a secret police agent who had slipped into one of the seminars.

Within a decade, Klaus was finance minister and then prime minister in the newly-free country. As prime minister, he did a deal to break it up.

Less than three years after casting off the Soviet yoke, Czechoslovakia split into two countries — the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

'I'm a normal person'

Breaking up the country was almost his first act after being elected prime minister in July 1992. The Slovak parliament, at the direction of the virulently nationalist leader Vladimir Meciar, had just passed a resolution demanding Slovak independence. Klaus met Meciar and they agreed on the split.

Czechoslovakia's then-president, Vaclav Havel, was so outraged that he resigned in protest. He demanded a referendum, knowing that opinion polls showed support for the split at less than 40 per cent. Klaus ignored him and the public.

His relations with Havel have long been stormy. Havel is the dramatist-dissident who led the Velvet Revolution, which broke the back of Communism in Czechoslovakia. He became the president of Czechoslovakia and then the president of the Czech Republic with, for several years, Klaus as his prime minister.

The feuding was constant and often public. "I am a normal person, he is not," Klaus said of Havel.

Havel replied that Klaus has only two ways of behaving: "Either he's afraid of someone. Or he's out to humiliate him."

Dissident in power

Klaus may think of himself as a normal person, but he doesn't behave like a normal president. He sees himself as a dissident in power, defending free-market values against what he sees as the encroachments and controls of the European Union. His aides report that he has a portrait of former British prime minister (and staunch EU foe) Margaret Thatcher in his office.

His latest crusade is against the Lisbon Treaty, signed by all the European Union members and designed, its authors say, to streamline decision-making in Brussels.

Klaus has carried this crusade to Ireland where, on an official visit in the fall, he visited Declan Ganley, who had headed and bankrolled the No side in the Irish referendum. The No side won, derailing the treaty, at least temporarily. The Irish government and official opposition had backed the Yes side.

Klaus made no apologies to his official hosts in the government. Rather, he added to their embarrassment by comparing his visit to those made by Western politicians and intellectuals to dissidents in his country when it was under the old Communist regime.

Then, a few weeks later, he took the fight back home, appearing before the Czech Constitutional Court to argue against the legality of the Lisbon Treaty, which his own government had signed.

Economy-class Slavs

The treaty, Klaus argued, was part of a strategy designed by "business-class Eurocrats" in Brussels to reduce to insignificance "economy-class Slavs" as well as people from all the small countries in the EU. "Even your jobs are in jeopardy," he told the judges.

But the judges looked unemployment in the face and didn't blink. They ruled that the treaty was not unconstitutional. As a result, the Czech parliament is expected to ratify the treaty in the coming months but Klaus still threatens not to sign the ratification document into law.

Adding more spice to the mix, Klaus refused last summer to join the European condemnation of Russia's military incursions in Georgia.

Then, on the subject of global warming, he published a book called Blue Planet in Green Chains. His thesis is that the threat of global warming is greatly exaggerated and, indeed, that the measures taken to fight it in Europe have contributed to the global financial crisis.

In the book, he dismisses environmental crusader Al Gore, the former U.S. vice-president, as "an apostle of arrogance."

It's a title other European leaders might be tempted to bestow on Klaus.

At the end of France's six-month reign at the EU, French President Nicolas Sarkozy took aim directly and publicly at Klaus.

He said a delegation of European MPs was insulted, and rightly so, when Klaus refused to fly the European flag when receiving them. Klaus seemed unperturbed.

The economy-class Slav in the pilot's seat seems set on giving the EU a rough ride for the next six months.