100TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDING OF THE CROATIAN PEOPLE'S PEASANT PARTY

Motif: Antun and Stjepan Radić, founders of the HPSS (Croatian People’s Peasant Party, Croatian acronym HPSS) and the relief Plowman by Robert Frangeš Mihanović. At the end of the year 1904 a new party started its activity on the Croatian political stage: the Croatian People’s Peasant Party (HPSS). Its founders, brothers Antun and Stjepan Radić, together with their close associates became aware of the need for a party to be formed in the predominately agricultural country of Croatia of that time, which would rely on the broadest strata of the population. The poor economic state of the Croatian rural area and a rather low educational status of the peasants, many of whom were illiterate, were favourable for the founding of the party that made the policy of enlightening the peasants and the economic raising of the rural regions their main target. While the fundamental ideas for the founding and activity of the HPSS came from Antun Radić, his younger brother Stjepan was actively working on the creation of the party structure. Owing to the fact that the peasant masses were only slightly interested in politics, the results of the struggle to enter the Croatian Parliament, Sabor, were not very successful at first, so there were only a few HPSS politicians who managed to get elected to become members of parliament on the eve of the First World War. Among them was Stjepan Radić, who became famous for his numerous, long and argumentative parliamentary debates. He delivered his famous speech on the eve of the establishment of the first Yugoslav state in the autumn of 1918, when he warned his parliamentary colleagues against rushing into a state community with other southern Slavs like geese in the fog. After the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was created, the party changed its name into the Croatian Republican Peasant Party. The intention of this symbolic act was to emphasize the demand for the establishment of a neutral peasant republic, not a monarchy that was created by the unification of the southern Slavonic peoples in 1918. In 1920, in the first elections in Yugoslavia between the two wars, the party won fifty mandates in the parliament, which made it fourth-placed in the Constituent Assembly. Yet, Stjepan Radić and the leadership of the party decided against participation in the activities of the parliament. In the following elections three years later the party won some additional seats in the Assembly – 67. Soon afterwards Radić, setting out on a search for international support for the realization of his political ideas, went to Moscow and entered the party into the membership of the Green International, the association of peasant parties under the Soviet domination. That sufficed for the authorities of the Yugoslav monarchy to outlaw the Croatian Republican Peasant Party and arrest Stjepan Radić. After that, Radić changed his tactics, acknowledged the political regime of the country established by the St.Vitus’ Day Constitution from the year 1921 and entered the government as its minister of education. The party changed its name for the third time, the name it has retained up to the present – the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS). The collaboration of the HSS politicians and the Serbian radicals headed by the prime minister Nikola Pašić did not last for long. Stjepan Radić found a new ally in the Serbian leader from outside Serbia Proper, Svetozar Pribičević, and together they founded the Peasant-Democratic coalition in 1927. It seemed as if the Croats and Serbs in Croatia had found modalities of common political activities when in June 1928, in the National Assembly in Belgrade, one of the radical parliamentary representatives started shooting amidst the parliamentary debate and killed two and seriously wounded several members of the HSS leadership. The state of health of the badly injured Stjepan Radić worsened and he died at the beginning of August of the same year. In Croatia and in other parts of the Yugoslav state with Croatian population, numerous demonstrations broke out, and the political life of the country was paralyzed. The founder of the party and its most eminent leader, Stjepan Radić, occupied a high place in the pantheon of Croatian national symbols. Vladko Maček succeeded Stjepan Radić at the head of the party. He managed to lead it successfully through the hard times that followed after King Alexander set up the dictatorship on 29th of January 1929 and forbade any political activity whatsoever. At that time HSS had already become a veritable representative of almost the whole of the Croatian people. Besides on the political level, Maček developed an exceptional activity on the economic and social area, offering incentives for the establishment and activity of associations like ‘Seljačka sloga’, ‘Hrvatski radnički savez’, ‘Hrvatska seljačka zaštita’, ‘Hrvatska građanska zaštita’(Peasant Unity, Croatian Workers’ Union, Croatian Peasant Protection, and Croatian Citizen Protection). The highest achievement of this successful policy was the agreement between Maček and the president of the Yugoslav government, Dragiša Cvetković, signed in August 1938. This political agreement made provisions for the creation of the Croatian Banovina, which encompassed in its structure all territories of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia where Croatians were the majority population. Vladko Maček was made vice-president of the government, and a number of outstanding members of the party’s leadership joined the government as ministers. The onset of war reached Yugoslavia, too, and in 1941 it had broken apart. In his wish to prevent a possible clash with the Ustasha government in the newly-established Independent State of Croatia, Maček invited the party supporters and the whole of the Croatian people to show obedience and abstain from any kind of resistance against the Ustasha movement. Part of the HSS leadership emigrated and continued there their efforts to preserve the continuity of participating in the Yugoslav governments. At the end of the war a number of HSS members, among them Ivan Šubašić, joined the government of Tito’s Yugoslavia. In the meantime numerous members of the party joined the national liberation movement. In spring of the year 1945 Maček emigrated and stopped having any significant influence in the party. The party formally continued with their activities for a time in the socialist Croatia and then its activity faded away. In the year 1990 the Croatian Peasant Party was re-established.