OECD Secretary-General Ángel Gurría will retire next year. The Czech government decided at the beginning of March that it would nominate its candidate Vladimír Dlouhý to head the organization. They announced the start of the campaign on Monday People’s Newspaper.
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“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has started working on the support of Vladimír Dlouhý and currently everything is in the preparatory phase,” Ministry spokeswoman Mariana Wernerová told the letter. According to the daily, Dlouhý’s goal in his campaign is probably Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, with which the Czechia forms the so-called Visegrad Four. According to Lidový noviny, Dlouhý himself did not respond to the question about his candidacy.
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The selection of the new OECD chief will begin in September and end next spring. “The appointment of a new Secretary-General will be decided by OECD member states by consensus,” Werner said. It is not yet clear how many candidates will compete for the position. Former Mexican Minister of Finance and Foreign Affairs Gurría was elected head of the organization in 2006.
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Today, Sixty-six-year-old Dlouhý was one of the most famous faces of the post-November economic transformation in the 1990s. From 1992 to 1997, he was Minister of Industry and Trade, then withdrew from politics and left for the private sector. He lectured at the university and from 2006 to 2008 he was a member of the so-called Pačes Commission, which elaborated the long-term energy concept of the Czech Republic.
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In January 2008 he became a member of the National Economic Council of the Government of the Czech Republic (NERV) and in August 2010 its renewed form. At the beginning of 2013, he unsuccessfully ran for president in the first direct elections of the head of state. He has been the President of the Chamber of Commerce since 2014, and is also an adviser to President Miloš Zeman.
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The OECD unites 36 highly developed countries of the world, establishing its congress in September 1961. However, its origins date back to post-war Europe. Its predecessor, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), was founded in April 1948 to manage the US Marshall Plan to help European countries devastated by World War II. The Czech Republic became a member of the OECD in December 1995.
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