Were the last two Czech presidents -- Petr Pavel and Milos Zeman -- put in office by unelected oligarchs? No, that's not true: Both were elected to office in a direct vote by Czech citizens. The claim appears based on the misreading of a social media post by a former official who never even mentioned the two presidents.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) where it was published on TikTok on November 13, 2023, with commentary translated into English from Czech by Lead Stories staff that says:
Czech media is telling us in the last few days that Zeman, the president, was put in office by oligarchs, billionaires who control agriculture, food production in the Czech Republic. They talked about it in the Czech media. And you probably all noticed that Zaoralek...said that Kretinsky and Tykac put in office the president, General Petr Pavel...
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Dec 13 11:56:25 2023 UTC)
No Czech news reports say that Milos Zeman, a former Czech president, was put in office by oligarchs who control agriculture and food production in the country. A Google search for the phrase "Zeman a zemědělští oligarchové" yielded no relevant results (archived here).
Former foreign minister Lubomir Zaoralek, a critic of government policies to cap the price of electricity, recently claimed in a Facebook post that prime ministerial adviser Jaroslav Zajicek met in September 2022 with Czech energy industry magnates Pavel Tykac and Daniel Kretinsky to discuss a cap on energy prices. Zaoralek did not even mention President Petr Pavel´s name in his post much less claim that the magnates put the president in office.
Verifying Zaoralek´s information about the meeting itself is beyond the scope of this fact check, but based on the FB post, there is no basis for a claim that the two presidents were put in office by oligarchs and were not instead elected in a democratic process, as stated in the TikTok video above.
Since 2013, Czech presidents have been directly elected by the people in two rounds for a five-year term. The last Czech presidential elections were held in 2023, resulting in the former head of the NATO Military Committee Petr Pavel defeating his opponent, and former prime minister, Andrej Babis, and becoming the country´s president at the time of writing. Pavel´s predecessor Milos Zeman could not run in the election due to the two-term limit.
