LIBERALS AND ANTON KOROŠEC IN THE YEARS BETWEEN 1918 AND 1940.

Dr. Anton Korošec (1872-1940), as every other excellent politician, was followed by contradictory assessments in his political and statesmanship activity. On the one hand, there was mass support and utmost emotional allegiance to him as the longterm leader of the catholic Slovenian People's Party (SLS) and the first man of the catholic movement. On the other hand, there was distinctive refusal by the members of the liberal and Marxism camp. In the framework of the traditional catholic-liberal opposition, the most declinatory ideological and political view of Korošec was formed on the liberal side. With the May Declaration of 1917 and the declaration movement in 1917-1918, Korošec became the undisputed Slovenian national leader. His primacy was not questionable for the liberals and they cooperated with him in the national emancipation fight. The conciliatory relationship between the liberals and Korošec lasted through all national emancipation efforts and through the overturn period to the new political momentum in December 1918, when the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Kingdom od SHS, from 1929 Kingdom of Yugoslavia) was established. In this time, the liberals labelled Korošec as the leader of the Slovenian nation, a man with their utmost confidence and the personification of the Yugoslav freedom, autonomy and independence. The same as in the Austrian era, Slovenes were engaged in ideological fights also in the Kingdom of SHS (from 1919 the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). Already in the first years after the creation of the Yugoslav state, the catholic and liberal sides encountered irreconcilable differences. The liberals reproached Korošec with being the leader of the conservative political clergy, who, as the minister of traffic did not yield to social requests of the railway workers and forced them to strike. The strike flamed and ended in April 1920 in blood on Zaloška cesta in Ljubljana. After his first ministerial positions, the liberals accused him of hindering the farmers economic progress, aiding to the tax load of Slovenia and signing the ratification of the Rapallo Treaty. He was supposed to be accountable also for the defeat of the Yugoslav (Slovene) side at the plebiscite in Carinthia in 1920. The central political problem of the first nationally integral and centrally founded Yugoslav state almost to the end was the question of its internal regulation. This was the cause of debates between advocates for the Yugoslav national integralism and state unitarism on the one side and national pluralism and autonomy-federalist state programme on the other side. In the 1920s, the majority of the Slovenian liberal politics supported Yugoslav unitarism, in the 1930s all of them. Korošec and the SLS were advocates for the existence of different Yugoslav national individualities and the autonomy-federalist Yugoslav state. The liberals or, in the most part of the 1920s, their leading party, the Yugoslav Democratic Party (Slovene part of the all-state Democratic Party, in 1924 renamed to the Independent Democratic Party), connected the fight for Yugoslav unitarism with the ideological political fight against Korošec and SLS. They declared that their efforts for Slovenian autonomy is a cover for the fight for total power of political Catholicism and its ideological image in Slovenia. SLS, with its autonomy course, had the majority Slovenian support and Korošec was the leading Slovene politician. In February 1928, Korošec became the minister for internal affairs. At this time, the first of the two strongest attacks of the liberal politics on Korošec in the Kingdom of SHS/Yugoslavia, occurred. After the fatal shots of the great Serbian deputy Puniša Račić on the Croatian deputies at the National Assembly in June 1928, which caused the death of the Croatian national leader Stjepan Radić, the liberal side attacked Korošec because he did not resign and with that exculpate SLS from being responsible for the crime. On June 6, 1928, the leading liberal political newspaper Jutro published an accusatory caricature, which pictured Korošec dressed in a bloodstained priest's robe, with a police hat and a bloodstained rubber truncheon in his right hand raised above the image of the Christ. SLS reacted harshly to the inappropriate caricature and in the summer of 1928 led a strong fight against liberal press. When Korošec became the president of the Yugoslav government in July 1928, the liberal side took a fervent declinatory stance. They stated that his position was only due to a tactical move of the hegemonic great Serbian politics to put a Slovenian catholic priest (and not a Serb) as the head of the government, which leads a strong battle with Croats. "This is the whole ideal of hegemonists. And for this, Korošec was bad enough, or good enough ..." Until September 1930, Korošec remained in the Yugoslav political top; even after his government resigned in December 1928 and after January 1929 when the king, Alexander I Karađorđević, proclaimed his dictatorship. In 1933, due to the opposition federalist Ljubljana Punctuations of SLS or the so-called Korošec Punctuations, there was a second attack of the liberals on Korošec. In accordance with their Yugoslav unity views, they reproached Korošec of making unacceptable demands, for the state union with the Serbs and Croats can only be a unitarian and an undivided Yugoslav whole. The punctuations present the destruction of Yugoslavia, the sin of Korošec on the nation and a crime. In 1935 there was a change in the political power between the catholic and liberal side. Between 1931 and 1935, the liberals were in power, later again the Catholics. In the second half of the 1930s, Korošec was again the strongest Slovenian politician and was among the key decision makers in the Yugoslav state. This reflected also in the stance, which the weakening liberal camp took. The liberal politics stepped aside and only reported on his political actions and did not comment on them. When Korošec suddenly died on December 14, 1940, liberals payed respects to their long term adversary. Not because of their weakening political position, but because they were aware of his historical political importance. Even though they were his most ardent opponents, they were aware of the extensiveness of his influence and actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]