Former Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, one of the politicians who played a major role in the country’s transition from communism to democracy, has died, a longtime political colleague said today. He was 85 years old.

Schwarzenberg was born into an aristocratic Czech family and became a top adviser to his friend Vaclav Havel when the former dissident won the country’s first free elections in 1990. He served twice as foreign minister between 2007 and 2013.

He was a staunch supporter of greater European integration and, although a self-professed conservative, his appeal extended to bourgeois liberal organizations and younger politicians.

He was taken to a hospital in Vienna last week, according to Czech media. News website Echo24, which first reported his death today, said his family were by his side when he breathed his last.

“Karel Schwarzenberg is dead,” Miroslav Kalusek, founder of the TOP09 party which Schwarzenberg led in its early days, said on social networking platform X.

“He was one of the most important and good people I have met in my life. May he rest in peace, the Czech Republic should be forever grateful to him for all that he selflessly did.”

Schwarzenberg had spent much of his life in exile as his family was targeted by communists who seized power in a coup d’état in 1948, confiscating the Schwarzenbergs’ vast estate which included castles, forests and farmland mainly in the southern part of the country, near the border with Austria.

In exile in Austria, where he eventually took over the management of the family estate, he supported the anti-communist and human rights movement and funded a library of banned Czech literature.

After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, which peacefully overthrew the communist regime in the then unified Czechoslovakia, Schwarzenberg became Havel’s chief of staff.

Schwarzenberg took a more active role in politics as a senator in 2004 and helped start the TOP09 party, which is a junior partner in the center-right coalition government now in power.

“Dear Kerry, thank you for all you have done for our country,” his party said goodbye to him in X.

In 2013, Schwarzenberg ran for president but lost to Milos Zeman, another figure in post-1989 Czech politics who completed his second presidential term earlier this year.