Other commentators and politicians dismissed the narrow margin of victory as an act of petty revenge by the followers of former Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, who was forced to resign in late November over a political financing scandal. Mr. Havel's election ''proves that we have not yet gone completely nuts,'' said Petr Pithart, chairman of the Senate. It was an expression of Czech political pettiness, an effort to humiliate someone,'' said Josef Lux, the agriculture minister and leader of the Christian Democrats. Now firmly ensconced in the presidential castle high above Prague for what will be his final five-year term, Mr. Havel has set himself the task of rebuilding a country that has fallen into a deep economic recession and an equally deep political and popular depression. The stock market has bottomed out, inflation and unemployment are rising, and many large Czech companies are having increasing difficulty selling their wares at home or abroad.
Analysts say the Czech economy is rotten and needs a major overhaul.
Already, Mr. Havel has had to step out of his preferred role as a sort of philosopher king to enter the political fray, outlining the new rules of the game and even selecting the main players. Family troubles, a fight with lung cancer and a bout of pneumonia in late fall had convinced many Czechs that their president was almost history. But when Mr. Klaus was ousted in November, Mr. Havel stepped back into the political fight, finally naming names and standing up for the moral principles that he had fought for as a dissident and as leader of the 1989 ''velvet revolution'' that overthrew Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. In an extraordinary speech to Parliament in early December, just after the government fell, Mr. Havel said society had fallen into a ''post-Communist morass,'' which he blamed largely on Mr. Klaus's ''cloak of liberalism without adjectives'' that allowed ''the most immoral people'' to achieve the greatest success. Mr. Havel laid out a 10-point program for his country to get back in shape, including rebuilding a respect for the rule of law, building popular support for the country's expected membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European Union, cleaning up the country's horrendous pollution, rebuilding what Mr. Havel likes to call ''civil society'' and ''reinvigorating'' the economic transformation.