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Slovakia’s First Female President, Zuzana Caputova, Takes Office in a Divided Country

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“It was just brutal how the state could ignore the will of the people,” Mr. Pavlovic said.

Ms. Caputova said that she was pregnant when she joined the landfill case. “Motherhood inspired me to get involved,” she said. The case soon took over her life. The same day she went into labor, she said, she was completing a legal brief.

Mr. Pavlovic said that she was nothing if not tough and stubborn. There were many times before they won the landfill case that it all seemed overwhelming and hopeless. “She was the one who would motivate others,” he said. “And she took a lot of the burden on herself.”

Mr. Pavlovic said she helped him deal with the pressure by introducing him to meditation, something that she had been doing for some time to deal with stress.

“I try to meditate every day,” Ms. Caputova said. She first came across books on Zen meditation as a teenager and has been a regular practitioner for 13 years. “I’m not sure how we’re going to manage that now,” she added. “But the regular practice is important for me.”

Mr. Pavlovic recalled that Ms. Caputova first broached the idea of running for president right after a meditation session early last year.

“She asked me what I thought,” he said. “I remember she was very unsure about joining politics.”

“My first reaction was, of course, ‘That’s fantastic,’” he said. “But she told me to think about it.”

After thinking it over, he sent her a passage from a favorite book, about how there are two roads one can choose. The dragon’s path, flying up into heaven. And the worm, digging deep into the ground.

To do the job of president well, he said, she would have to make the harder choice, to be the worm.

“But on election night,” he said, “I told her that she had finally managed to connect these two roads into one.”

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