"The re-election of Václav Klaus. Now, I have to say one thing that may surprise you. I did not find Václav Klaus's first term dramatically bad. I thought it could be worse. The People's Party failed to persuade Petr Pithart to run for a second time. The Christian Democratic Union did not have a uniform opinion on whom to support, because frankly speaking, Professor Švejnar did not seem like a suitable candidate to many. I was trying hard to convince Petr Pithart to run because I would have fought tooth and nail for him. Jan Sokol, same thing; he did not want to run at all. It was a difficult situation. And the actual course of the election... Today, we have a direct election of the President of the Republic. Enter the then Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, Mr. Vlček. We had a meeting with the leadership of the Senate in the Chamber of Deputies the night before and it was agreed that the ballot would be secret. Something happened by the morning, I don't know what but I think Paroubek had the biggest say in it, though I'm not sure. Vlček came up with the idea of a public ballot without discussing it with anyone and started taking cues Vojtěch Filip, the chairman of the Communist Party. And it was such an embarrassment that I will probably never forget it. That's when I realised I didn't want to ever experience that again. The previous elections, Havel's and Klaus's first, were not a cultural experience by any means, but this was really extraordinary. If there is any footage, I don't recommend anyone to watch that because they would get completely disgusted."
"The land border was never respected, whether in the pre-1990 arrangement or in 1960 when the administrative structure was upgraded. Speaking for myself, as someone who has lived on the land border all my life (since the border runs between Přibyslav and Žďár nad Sázavou), we were never bothered by the land border. The strongest perception of the land border was among the Brno citizens and those who lived east of Brno. But the very discussion about the regions - and this is related to what I mentioned, that if we had held elections for regional national committees (which could have been called anything else of course) in 1990, the appetite for forming of new regions would have been much less. I believe that if there were to be any further division, there would just be one - namely to form the Olomouc Region. See, Moravia had only two regions for a population of 4 million, North and South Moravia, and that was difficult to administer compared with some Czech regions. I would consider that obvious. Once the discussion opened up, though, there was no end to it really. Apart from the Olomouc region, which was perceived as necessary, lobbyists from various regions started to show off their power and regions were created that might not normally have been. I will mention just two now, with apologies to those who find this repugnant. I think that the Karlovy Vary Region and the Liberec Region did not have to be created."
"We read Lidová demokracie (ČSL party newspaper) only in part because my father considered it a collaborationist newspaper. That changed, of course, at a certain point around 1968. There were diverse sources of information. It was the radio, of course, though the reception wasn't very good and neither was the radio receiver. Radio jammers are the main thing I remember from that time. I also remember the radio as our home companion like in most families. Saturday radio plays, Sunday fairytales, and also Zdeněk Nejedlý's Sunday speeches. Then I remember, now that we mentioned the radio, the first and last time I saw my father cry. That was on a Sunday at noon, if I remember correctly, when they announced that Kennedy had been shot. The democratic public here were counting on him at the time to make things better with the Russians. I remember that was a blow. That was one source of information. The other source of information, of course, was priests among whom my parents had a lot of friends. When they started coming back from prison, they often found their way to us. Especially the Salesian priests, because there was Dvorek near Přibyslav. It was a Salesian colony where they were educated before the war, and then Salesian youth briefly after the war. There was a close connection, and our door was open to the Salesian priests."
Jan Kasal was born in Nové Město na Moravě on 6 November 1951. His family had a long People’s Party tradition, and both parents were also strongly religious. His father ran a grocery shop and was forced to join the Jednota in the 1950s. As a child, Jan Kasal went to boy scouts. He graduated from a general high school in 1970. His father took part in the re-establishment of the Czechoslovak People’s Party (ČSL) in Přibyslav in 1967-1968. Jan Kasal went to study at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Czech Technical University. Then he started working at Žďárské strojírny. He married in 1975 and had three daughters with his wife. In 1986 he joined the ČSL, and was elected to its central committee in November 1989. He became a deputy of the Czech National Council (ČNR) for the ČSL in 1990. He defended his mandate as a deputy in the regular elections of 1990 and 1992. After the establishment of the independent Czech Republic in January 1993, the Czech National Council was transformed into the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic. He defended his mandate four times. He was the chairman of the KDU-ČSL from 1999 to 2002. In 2012 he was elected to the Regional Council of the Vysočina Region. This was his last political mandate. He lived in Vysočina in 2024.
