Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright turned world statesman, was re-elected president of his country last night. The contest was not a walkover, with Mr Havel forced into a second round of voting by parliamentary deputies after he failed to achieve a clear-cut victory.
The 61-year-old was returned to office with 99 votes from the 197 deputies present, and 47 out of the 81 senators, giving him the majority needed in the two houses, the speaker of the Czech parliament, Mr Milos Zeman said.
Earlier Mr Havel, who led the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, had failed to garner the majority required in a first round of voting, winning 91 votes in the 200-member lower house and 39 in the 80-seat Senate. He had been widely expected to be re-elected, five years after he became President of the Czech Republic following its split from Slovakia at the end of 1992.
Two marginal candidates stood against him: a far-right leader, Mr Miroslav Sladek, in jail on charges of inciting racial hatred, and Mr Stanislav Fischer (62), an astrophysicist supported by communists.
The vote by secret ballot was preceded by a debate in the ornate Spanish Hall of Prague Castle. A minority of speakers opposed him but most sung his praises.
The vote comes amid political turmoil after the government of Mr Vaclav Klaus collapsed last month. Mr Havel stood for re-election only months after fighting lung cancer and pneumonia. His popularity has remained consistently high, rarely falling below 50 per cent in the opinion polls, and reaching highs of 88 per cent in 1990 and 87 per cent in January 1997.
"One day the historians will call these days extraordinary," he once told a crowd of 200,000 in November 1989, during the bloodless Velvet Revolution which overturned communism and propelled him into the presidency almost overnight.
Born in October 1936 into a relatively wealthy Czech family, he was refused a higher education under anti-bourgeois regulations of the 1950s communist regime. He turned early to the theatre, working behind the scenes for years before he won international fame as a playwright.
He saw his first political front-line action during the 1968 Prague Spring, when the budding shoots of reform were brutally crushed by Soviet tanks. For his part in it Havel was banned from public life, in theory for good.
But while working at various jobs, including at a local brewery, he continued his underground dissident activities and gained notoriety through his numerous arrests.
Over his long writing career, he penned 13 plays and six political essays. His works have been translated worldwide.
Less than a decade after the tanks rolled into Prague, Mr Havel drafted large parts of Charter 77, the declaration which played a key role in attracting international attention to the civil rights abuses in the country.
The 1977 movement played a major role in the anti-government demonstrations which began in 1988, and Mr Havel was at the head of the group which founded Civic Forum in 1989 and led negotiations with the Communists.
Slovakia's ruling coalition yesterday voted down a parliamentary motion to discuss the cases of two deputies stripped of their mandates in violation of constitutional court rulings. A similar snub to the constitutional court in October provoked criticism from the EU and the US.