Jan Ruml

January Ruml ( born March 5, 1953 in Prague) is a Czech politician, co-founder of ODS, later founder and chairman of the Unie svobody ( Freedom Union ).

In Czechoslovakia Ruml initially worked as a dissident and was among the signatories of Charter 77 in 1990, he became Deputy Minister of the Interior in 1991 and participated in the founding of ODS. He was elected to only a few months in office Czechoslovak Parliament in 1992 and took over the government of Václav Klaus, the Office of the Czech interior minister. In the fall of 1997 broke within the ODS in the context of a party funding scandal, a intra-party conflict from. Ruml criticized together with the deputy party chairman Ivan Pilip the party leader and Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus sharply and demanded his resignation. Klaus again tried to dismiss as a minister, which initially failed because of the resistance of President Václav Havel, and only took place with a delay on 7 November 1997 Ruml. After the coalition partner of the ODS, ODA and the KDU -CSL leaked from the government because of intra-party dispute the ODS, ultimately came back the entire cabinet. In the early Congress of ODS on 19 December 1997 Ruml failed in his attempt to take over as party chairman Klaus. Then he formed together with Ivan Pilip and with a group of his loyal deputy own platform that participated in contrast to Klaus deputies loyal to the government Josef Tošovský. From this platform out Ruml founded together with Ivan Pilip shortly svobody the Unie ( Freedom Union ), whose first chairman was elected.

The Freedom Union reached in the early parliamentary election in the Czech Republic in 1998 8.6% of the vote and Ruml went as a delegate to the Czech Chamber of Deputies. He refused to cooperate with the election winner, the social democratic CSSD, the lack of alternatives then entered into a coalition agreement with the opposition ODS. In response, the U.S. joined as a counter- alliance with the DEU, the ODA and the KDU -CSL together the so-called four-party coalition. The deputy's mandate was Ruml already in autumn 1998 again, after he had been in Prague, elected to the Senate, the upper house of the Czech Parliament. By the end of 1999, however, Ruml gave the party presidency of the U.S. on the grounds of a shared responsibility for the mutual blockades in Czech politics. His Senate mandate, he could not defend 2004.

Ruml later criticized the participation of the Freedom Union in the coalition with the CSSD 2002-2006 and resigned from the Freedom Union. In 2010 he joined the Green Party Strana a zelených (SZ ).