Ján Budaj

He was born on 10 February 1952 in Bratislava and is one of the leading figures of the Velvet Revolution. Since 2016 he has been a Member of the National Council of the Slovak Republic for the OĽANO movement.

After finishing secondary school, he and a classmate tried to cross the “Iron Curtain”. Their escape across the Czechoslovak border failed, however, and he was thus branded a hostile person with a tarnished cadre record. He was imprisoned several times and frequently interrogated, and remained under surveillance even after his release. He was also strictly forbidden to leave the country.

Although he later managed to begin studying mathematics and physics at the Faculty of Education in Trnava, he was expelled in his fourth year. From 1976 he worked as a boiler stoker and auxiliary worker in various enterprises, while organising independent culture and pursuing his own creative work. In 1980 he founded the first civic-oriented samizdat in Slovakia, the periodical Kontakt. He cooperated with the underground Church and with civic initiatives such as the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted.

In the 1980s he was involved as an activist and organiser in a wide range of anti-regime activities, culminating in the publication of Bratislava/nahlas (Bratislava/Aloud) by Slovak environmental activists in September 1987. In it, Ján Budaj (together with other authors) openly criticised the state of the environment, the quality of life in the capital, and the incompetence and ossification of the regime. Because of his activities, Ján Budaj was under the surveillance of the State Security (StB), which tried by every means to discredit him.

Ján Budaj is best known to the general public in connection with the mass demonstrations in Bratislava in November and December 1989, during which he and Milan Kňažko hosted the rallies on SNP Square; he became a symbol of the Velvet Revolution in Slovakia.

On 19 November 1989 the Public Against Violence (VPN) movement was founded at the Umelecká beseda with the participation of a number of intellectuals and civic activists; Ján Budaj was first its coordinator and, from January 1990, its chairman. From November 1989 until the first free elections in June 1990 he led VPN and was a member and First Deputy Chairman of the Slovak National Council (SNR), where he also initiated the establishment of the SNR Committee for the Environment.

He later served as a Member of the National Council of the Slovak Republic for the Slovak Democratic Coalition, was elected to the Bratislava City Council, ran for Mayor of Bratislava in the 2010 municipal elections and, as leader of the party Zmena zdola – Demokratická únia (Change from Below – Democratic Union), stood in the parliamentary elections in March 2012. Since 2016 he has been a Member of the National Council of the Slovak Republic, elected for the party Obyčajní ľudia a nezávislé osobnosti (Ordinary People and Independent Personalities).