Vladimír Mečiar

Vladimír Mečiar (born 1942) served three terms as Prime Minister of Slovakia, briefly in 1990 and 1991 within the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, and twice in independent Slovakia from 1992 to 1994 and from 1994 to 1998, dominating the country's first decade as a sovereign state.

Born in Zvolen in central Slovakia, Mečiar studied law at Comenius University in Bratislava, completing his degree only in 1974 after expulsion from the Communist Party in 1970 for sympathizing with the Prague Spring. He worked for fifteen years as an in-house lawyer at a glassworks in Nemšová before reentering politics in 1989 with the Public Against Violence movement during the Velvet Revolution.

As Slovak Interior Minister and then prime minister of the Slovak component of the federation, he led the negotiations with Czech counterpart Václav Klaus that produced the Velvet Divorce of 1 January 1993. His Movement for a Democratic Slovakia governed independent Slovakia for most of the following six years, presiding over a controversial mass privatization that enriched insiders, the abduction of President Michal Kováč's son to Austria in August 1995, and the disappearance of investigator Robert Remiáš in a 1996 car bombing. The European Union excluded Slovakia from its first round of eastern enlargement negotiations on democratic grounds.

Defeated by Mikuláš Dzurinda's coalition in the 1998 election, Mečiar twice contested the presidency unsuccessfully, in 1999 and 2004, and gradually faded from the political front rank. His party dissolved itself in 2014.

The name Vladimír derives from the Old Slavic Volodiměrъ, formed from volodi, to rule, and měrъ, great or famous, sometimes glossed as ruler of peace through folk etymology with mir. The tenth-century Kievan prince Vladimir the Great gave the name its Christian prestige; he shares it with three Russian and Ukrainian heads of state of his own era.