It was a shock, but I will not attack Pavel, claims the ex-chancellor. He keeps one secret

The grounds of Prague Castle are completely empty at seven o’clock in the morning except for the soldiers on guard. With one exception. Former chancellor Jana Vohralíková walks through individual courtyards with her white retriever Arly. He has been coming here every day for several months.

“When I was still working here, I used to go out to walk him around six o’clock. I got him eleven months ago from the children as a puppy and I’m happy to have him,” she says of her dog, whose size no longer looks like a puppy at all. But he is friendly towards people, he is used to walking in places where even police dogs go.

If Jana Vohralíková deviated from her regular route by just a few steps, she could head to her former workplace, where she was last in mid-February. Since then, her notice period ran until the end of April, when she “kept making things up”. Her real time off has only started now.

She says that in the future she would like to work on some “nice project”, she mentions the planned Vltava Philharmonic, for example. “I don’t mean this project directly. I’m giving it as an example of something in which I see great sense. And it has an overlap. I already have a lot of experience, so I think I could be useful in something similar,” points out the woman, who is originally a designer by profession in the construction industry.

She seems content and balanced, which according to her is helped a lot by the fact that she stayed at the Castle in a house with a garden where Arly has a paddock. “I am grateful to Mr. President that I can stay here until the end of the year,” she says. As Aktuálně.cz wrote in March, Vohralíková will pay 23,000 crowns a month for the apartment, including services. The castle claims that no one else would have lived in the apartment anyway.

“There is nothing behind it other than the fact that Mr. President behaved like a decent person. When I asked him in January during the negotiations about my departure, he said that he would definitely accommodate me. After all, I have a contract until the end of the year I’m really grateful to him because I’m not under any pressure to move out quickly. Another employee of the presidential office lives in the house, and another employee will be moving.

When the president announced this to me, it was a shock

During the meeting with Aktuálně.cz, the former chancellor did not want to look back too much on her work at the head of the president’s office, nor to comment on reports of disputes with the president’s adviser and friend Petr Kolář. She argued that she no longer gives interviews, but sometimes she goes to a discussion if the invitation interests her.

“I like meeting people very much, I have excellent experiences with them. It seems like a paradox to me. Although many unflattering articles have been published about me in the past, people often approach me in person and behave very nicely,” she praises herself and laughs. she tells how she is stopped on the street and addressed as “lady from the Castle”. You could also see it during the aforementioned morning walk with the dog, when she warmly greeted several employees of the Castle who were just coming to work.

According to her words, she has not yet met President Pavle. What exactly he told her when he announced the end, he doesn’t want to reveal. “I admit that at the first moment when he announced it to me, it was a shock. But now that I replay the first moments with the passage of time, I did not feel disappointment at that moment. I took it as reality. This is just the way it is, I’m leaving. Maybe it’s even with age. When a person is sixty, it seems to me like a waste of time to feed on some negative feelings,” he explains. But he repeats that he does not feel wronged, disappointed or sorry.

Although there have been several articles about how the chancellor was difficult to get along with and misbehaved with some of her subordinates, she herself unequivocally denies this. “It’s not true. I’m a demanding person who demands that the office work as well as possible. But that doesn’t mean I treat people badly. Of course, when you have to say goodbye to someone because they’re not good enough for their job, it’s not easy, to accept it,” says Vohralíková.

Kolář did not have a contract and did not want one

Aktuálně.cz visited one of the talks where the ex-chancellor spoke. She quickly won the audience not only by telling about how things went at the Castle, which people were most interested in, but also by talking about her childhood, which was not easy. Her father was unjustly sentenced to eleven years in prison by the communists in the 1950s, which affected her youth and later life.

During the interview, Vohraliková answers all questions except for one – what the president said to her when he announced her termination. “I respect the right of Mr. President to choose a person to lead the presidential office. Especially when he shares a lot of things with this person. It is really up to him,” he points out.

Even this time, however, he speaks only positively about him. “I am convinced that he is capable of giving people hope. He remains for me a person who has the potential to change this country, unless something completely unexpected happens. I cannot be the one to attack him in any way,” she declares.

But people were also curious about her relationship with adviser Petar Kolář, with whom she got into a dispute over his security clearance. Vohralíková continues to stand behind the procedure at that time. “Our office could request a background check only for those people who have a contract with us for some work. In the request for a background check, we state what such a person does for us and why we are requesting a background check. But Petr Kolář did not have such a contract and did not want one. So we couldn’t ask for a background check,” explains the former chancellor. After her departure, Kolář said that he would no longer pursue a background check.

According to her words, she tried to have correct relations with Kolar because they knew each other well. “In 2018, we founded the association Občané pro, in the framework of which Petr Kolář and Petr Pavlo went to meetings called A Soldier and a Diplomat. Even then we thought that one of them could run for president. Subsequently, a public opinion poll showed that Petr Pavel has a much better chance to succeed,” he describes.

There was a clash of two different worlds

During the interview, she talks about her year’s work at the Castle as a very hectic and difficult period, when she tried to get the office back on its feet after the era of Chancellor Vratislav Mynář. “Nobody has any idea in what condition I took over the office and how much work I had to do with my colleagues,” says Vohralíková. She started in a situation where most people welcomed the changes at the Castle. And they were waiting for calm after the era of Miloš Zeman, Vratislav Mynář and Martin Nejedlý.

However, speculations about disputes in the presidential office and reports about the departure of people who worked with Pavel before the presidential elections were repeatedly made public. Vohralíková explains the events at that time by saying that two completely different worlds collided – officials and employees who had worked there for a long time, and newly arrived people.

“The newcomers came to the Castle with the enthusiasm they brought back from the winning campaign. They were convinced that the president was great and a lot of new things needed to be done as quickly as possible. However, things in the state administration do not go so easily, so some did not treat the officials very well . But it was impossible to blame the officials for everything, they were doing their job, which they knew, unlike the newcomers,” Vohralíková describes her view.

As in the case of Peter Paul, in the case of the apparatus of the castle office, they do not choose any critical words. On the contrary, according to her words, she is happy how many of the people she chose remain in leadership positions. For example, former banker and Prague deputy mayor for finance Pavel Vyhnánek, whom she chose as director of the finance department, proved himself so well that he became director of the Prague Castle Administration this month.

Vohralíková is now most looking forward to the beginning of June, when the Václav Havel Bench will be ceremonially unveiled in the place where she is happiest – in Budislav near Litomyšl, near the ecumenical church of God’s love, which she designed and which has the shape of a human heart. “I mentioned in the past that I would very much like to have a Václav Havel Bench near this church. And the children and my friends fulfilled this wish. In addition, Mrs. Dagmar Havlová wrote a beautiful letter to the bench,” she adds.

Jana Vohralíková was one of the first guests of the Spotlight show in March 2023: