Miroslav Beneš

Miroslav Beneš (born 5 April 1956) is a Czech politician and former member of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS). He also served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic and as the deputy chairman of the ODS.

Biography
Beneš was born on 5 April 1956 in Strakonice. After attending Strakonice Gymnasium from 1971 to 1975, Beneš graduated from the Faculty of Nuclear and Physical Engineering in Prague in 1980. He worked in Energoprojekt Prague as a laborer in a starch factory and as a miner in a uranium mine. From 1986, he worked at the Temelín Nuclear Power Plant. In 1992, he established a consulting firm. He serves as the secretary to the vice president of the Supreme Audit Office (NKÚ).

Political career
From 1994 to 1998, Beneš was the mayor of České Budějovice. He was elected to the city council in the municipal elections of 1994, 1998, and 2002, representing the ODS.

He entered national politics at the end of 1997 in connection with the ODS. He was elected deputy chairman of the ODS at the 8th ODS congress in December 1997. He held this position until December 1999 when Petr Nečas took over at the 10th ODS congress. Beneš returned to the position of deputy chairman at the 12th ODS congress in November 2001, staying in the role until the 13th ODS congress in December 2002. In 2003, he led successful negotiations as the chief negotiator for the ODS leading to the election of Václav Klaus as the President of the Czech Republic.

In the 1998 elections, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the ODS (electoral district: South Bohemian Region). He successfully defended his mandate in the 2002 elections and remained in the Chamber until the 2006 elections. From 1998 to 2002, he chaired the parliamentary committee for public administration, regional development, and the environment. He was also a member of the organizational committee and, from 2001 to 2002, a member of the election committee. In the period from 2002 to 2004, he served as the chairman of the election committee and a member of the constitutional committee, and from 2004 to 2006, he was a member of the committee for European affairs.

In 2004, before the European Parliament elections, Beneš served as a co-opted Member of the European Parliament until regularly elected representatives from the Czech Republic took office. He did not run in the 2004 EP elections.

In the 2008 Senate elections, he ran for the ODS in the Senate electoral district No. 12 Strakonice. However, with a 22% result, he did not advance to the second round. His opponents in the second round were the incumbent senator Josef Kalbáč of the KDU-ČSL and the victorious candidate of the Social Democrats, Miroslav Krejča. After leaving the Chamber of Deputies, he worked as the chief advisor to Minister of Industry and Trade Martin Říman.

Later, he left the ODS, and in the 2014 municipal elections, he run for the city council of České Budějovice for the newly formed party Tories, founded by another former ODS member, Oldřich Vojíř, in Most. He ran as an independent, led the candidate list but was not successful.

Personal life
Beneš is married and has two sons, Matouš (b. 1979) and Tomáš (b. 1983).