PRAGUE, Czech Republic, April 16 (UPI) -- Former Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Stanislav Gross, who became the republic's youngest prime minister at 35, died at the age of 45 on Wednesday night.
Gross became prime minister in 2004 before he resigned due to questions raised about his personal finances, resulting in dispute in his political coalition about how he was able to finance an apartment in Prague worth millions.
Czech media report Gross suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease, a neurological disease that leads to the loss of muscle function.
"In a political sense, I think he will be remembered as a tragic figure," Jakub Janda of the European Values think-tank told Radio Prague." And even a bad example in the sense of how by being young, inexperienced and, with some very bad habits, you could climb to the highest levels of Czech politics and even become prime minister. So in this sense, he will be remembered as a memento of what Czech politics was about in the early 2000s."
Gross became the youth leader of his Social Democrats party after communism fell. He was elected to parliament and later received a law degree from the University of Plzen. He is survived by his wife Sarka Grossova and two daughters.
"He didn't appear publicly very much after resigning from politics. But when he did, it was, for example, in some Czech Television documentary. And it looked like he was saying sorry or feeling sorry for himself," Janda said. "In my view, he was looking back over his political life and saying sorry to all the people he had, in a sense hurt, and to the political system he had hurt."
