Earlier, Mr Karel Urbanek, the new party leader, had his first talks with Mr Havel and, according to the latter, backed the opposition's call to rid the government of 'discredited figures' in favour of'young, able experts'.

Having failed to exert strong leadership in times of trouble, Mr. Sarney now seems a lonely and discredited figure.

Anatoly Chubais, an economic reformer who left Russia's old Czarist capital to run post-Communist privatization, is now a politically discredited figure, blamed for improving the lives of a wealthy few at the expense of the numerous poor.

Since Watergate, Nixon has been a discredited figure and some of his attempts to bring order to the fragmented system of government stepped beyond the bounds of legality.

A6 Brazil's President, Jose Sarney is a lonely and discredited figure whose political influence is so eroded that, even with 14 months of his five-year term still to be served, his words and actions are largely ignored.

Although his critics - and he was not wrong in believing that he had bitter enemies with long memories - find this to be only the latest display of shamelessness from a discredited figure, time seems to have softened his public image.

(iv) Those who opposed the euro, and that includes such a hopeless discredited figure as Brown, are also allowed a few I" told you so's" at this point.

LEAD: Brazil's Power Vacuum Brazil's Power Vacuum As Brazil ends a transition from dictatorship to democracy, President Jose Sarney is a lonely and discredited figure with little power.

But Pashtuns are outweighed in the interim government by members of the next-largest ethnic group, Tajiks, who regard Zahir as a discredited figure with little to offer in the post-Taliban era.

By the time I met James Jesus Angleton in the early 1980's, he was a discredited figure, a stooped, ashen-faced man left to tend to the orchids he loved and the conspiracy theories he could not let go.