Zdeněk Hřib was born on 21 May 1981 in Slavičín, near the city of Zlín in the south-east of the Czech Republic. He studied medicine at the Charles University in Prague and participated in a student exchange program in Taiwan. Subsequently, Hřib held managerial positions in the healthcare industry, focusing on digitization of healthcare services. Since 2012, he has been the director and founder of a non-profit organization that provides quality control, efficiency assessment and consulting for healthcare providers as well as consumer protection for healthcare customers. In 2013, Hřib became a registered supporter of the Czech Pirate Party and ran unsuccessfully in the 2014 Prague municipal election.
Mayor of Prague (2018–present)
The Pirates ranked second in the 2018 Prague municipal election winning 13 out of 65 seats in the Prague City Assembly and formed a governing coalition with the third and fourth-ranked coalitions that holds a total of 39 out of 65 seats. Hřib, as the leading Pirate candidate with 75,082 votes, was elected the Mayor of Prague on 15 November 2018 by the Prague City Assembly and took over the office from Adriana Krnáčová. in April 2019 In 2018, during a meeting with foreign diplomats in Prague, Hřib was asked by the Chinese ambassador to the Czech Republic to expel the representative of Taiwan, and Hřib refused to do so. He has criticized a clause of the sister city agreement between Prague and Beijing that references to the One-China principle and he stated that this policy is "a complicated matter of foreign politics between two countries" and therefore "has no place in the sister cities agreement". Hřib also subsequently criticized a retaliatory decision of the Chinese government to cancel a planned tour of China by the Prague Philharmonia as a politicization of culture. According to The Guardian, Hřib was responsible for restoring the "Czech Republic’s image as a champion of human rights". In December 2019, Hřib was among the four mayors of Visegrad Group capitals Prague, Warsaw, Bratislava and Budapest, who signed a so-called “Pact of Free Cities” that agrees to protect "common values of freedom, human dignity, democracy, equality, rule of law, social justice, tolerance and cultural diversity". On 17 January 2019, Hřib appealed to the city council to name a street in Prague in honor of Paweł Adamowicz, the former mayor of Gdańsk in Poland who was assassinated on 13 January 2019. On 5 June 2019, the street in Riegrovy Sady park named after Adamowicz was officially inaugurated. In February 2020, he named the square in front of the Russian embassy “Boris Nemtsov Square”. In April 2020, Hřib oversaw the removal of the statue dedicated to Soviet marshalIvan Konev. In April 2020, Hřib was put under police protection, because Czech intelligence had received evidence of a planned poisoning attack by the Russian secret service.
