Michal Kováč

Michal Kováč (1930–2016) was a Slovak banker and politician who served as the first President of independent Slovakia from 1993 to 1998. He guided the new state through its earliest constitutional crises and is remembered for his defence of parliamentary democracy against the executive of Vladimír Mečiar.

Kováč was born in Ľubiša, in eastern Slovakia, and trained as an economist at the University of Economics in Bratislava. He worked as a banker for Živnostenská banka and Štátna banka československá, including a posting in London in the 1960s. After being expelled from the Communist Party for his sympathies with the 1968 Prague Spring, he spent the normalisation years in lower posts before returning to senior banking roles after 1989.

He served as federal minister of finance of Czechoslovakia in 1989–1991 and as Slovak finance minister, then as the last chairman of the Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia in 1992. After the dissolution of the federation he was elected President by the Slovak parliament in February 1993 as a candidate of Mečiar's HZDS, but the two men quickly fell out over the direction of the new state.

His five-year term was marked by repeated clashes with the government, the abduction of his son to Austria by the Slovak intelligence service in 1995, and his refusal to ratify several disputed laws. He left office in 1998 and was awarded the Order of the White Double Cross.

The given name Michal is the Slovak and Czech form of Michael, from the Hebrew Mikha'el, meaning 'who is like God'. It is one of the most common masculine names in Slovakia. He bore it as the country's first head of state.