Slovenian People's Party - Establishment and Early Years

Establishment and Early Years

The Slovenian People's Party was established in May 1988 under the name of Slovenian Peasant Union (Slovenska kmečka zveza) as the first openly non-Communist political organization in Slovenia and Yugoslavia after 1945. The establishment of the Slovenian Peasant Union is frequently considered as one of the crucial events in the Slovenian Spring of 1988. In January 1989, it could register as a party. In the first multi-party election in Slovenia, the Peasant Union ran as a part of the DEMOS coalition and won 11 of the 80 seats in the Slovenian Parliament. The party's name was changed to the current form in 1991, alluding to the pre-war Catholic conservative Slovene People's Party. The renaming of the party caused a controversy with the Slovene Christian Democrats, who considered themselves the official heirs of the pre-war Slovene People's Party, since the Slovene People's Party in exile merged with the Slovene Christian Democrats in 1990.

In 1992, Marjan Podobnik was elected as president of the party. Under his leadership, the Slovenian People's Party pursued an agrarian, ethnonationalist and corporatist ideology. In 1992, the founder of the Slovenian Peasant Union Ivan Oman left the party and joined the Slovene Christian Democrats, who were then part of the ruling centrist grand coalition.

Between 1992 and 1996, the Slovene People's Party was, together with the Slovenian National Party, the largest opposition party. Its ideology and policies were marked by a populist shift. In late 1995, representatives of the People's Party called for a referendum to suspend the citizenship of non-ethnic Slovenes. The attempt was stopped by the Constitutional Court.

Ahead of the parliamentary election of 1996, the People's Party formed the Slovenian Spring alliance together with the Slovene Christian Democrats (SKD), that referred to the historical Slovenian People's Party, as well. However the alliance, was disbanded immediately after the elections, when the SLS joined a coalition government with the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia (LDS), while the SKD went into opposition. In April 2000, strains between SLS and the Liberal Democrats led to the former's withdrawal from the coalition. In early May, SLS, SKD and SDS elected Christian democrat Andrej Bajuk prime minister instead.