Dictatorship January 6

The reason for the introduction of the dictatorship was the murder of Stepan Radic . The royal manifesto, published on January 6, 1929, said: “The hour has come when there should no longer be any intermediaries between the people and the king ... Parliamentary institutions that my blissfully departed father used as a political tool remain my ideal ... But blind political passions are so abused the parliamentary system, that it became an obstacle to any useful national activities. Agreement and even the usual relations between parties and individuals have become completely impossible. Instead of developing and implementing the idea of ​​national unity, parliamentary leaders began to provoke clashes and disunity of the people ... My holy duty at all costs is to preserve the national unity of the state ... This ideal should be the most important law not only for me, but for every person. Such an obligation imposes on me my responsibility to the people and history, my love for the country and the holy memory of the countless and priceless victims who fell for this ideal. To resort, as before, to a parliamentary change of government or to new elections to the legislative assembly would mean to lose precious time in vain attempts that have taken away our last few years. We must look for new methods of work and lay new paths ” ^[2] . In January 1929, all political parties were banned ^[3] .

In 1929, the following measures were taken ^[4] :

• Reduced the number of ministries from 16 to 12;
• The country became known as "Yugoslavia"
• Instead of dividing into 33 regions, introduced in 1922, the country was divided into 9 banovins and a special administrative-territorial unit into which Belgrade was included;

On September 3, 1931, the king granted the country a Constitution that provided for the creation of a second chamber of parliament (the Senate), half of whose members were appointed by the monarch ^[5] . The first parliamentary elections were scheduled for November 8, 1931, and for the registration each party list had to collect a large number of signatures from all constituencies of the kingdom ^[5] . As a result, in the elections of 1931, only the government list of candidates was presented, and the elected deputies in December of the same year created a single party - the Yugoslav Radical Peasant Democracy (renamed Yugoslav National Party on July 20, 1933) ^[6] . The actual end of the dictatorship was the assassination of King Alexander on October 9, 1934 in Marseilles . After this event in Yugoslavia, Prince Regent Paul came to power with the minor King Peter II . Almost immediately, Slovenian and Croatian leaders ( A. Koroshets and V. Machek ) were released from arrest, the former parliament was dissolved, and new elections to the Assembly were held according to the updated March 1933, which made it possible to obtain deputy mandates for representatives of opposition parties ^[7] . However, under the current electoral law, the government list, which received only 60.64% of the votes, received 303 seats in parliament out of 370 ^[8] . After some political struggle, an agreement was concluded in 1939 between Cvetkovic and Macheka , which created the Croatian banovina in Yugoslavia. This territorial unit, formed on a national basis, contradicted the principles of King Alexander, who adhered to the unification policy.