Buchar, Franz

After graduating from the institute of St. Stanislav in Szentvid near Ljubljana, he entered the Faculty of Law of the University of Ljubljana . After the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia joined the Liberation Front of Slovenia . In May 1942 he was arrested by the Italian fascist authorities and sent to the Gonars concentration camp. After a truce was declared between Italy and the Allies in World War II in September 1943, he returned home, but was soon again arrested by the Nazis. In July 1944, he managed to escape and joined the partisan resistance in southern Carinthia. In 1944, he joined the Communist Party of Slovenia , after receiving guarantees that he could preserve the Roman Catholic religious affiliation. In May 1945, it was part of the military unit that liberated Klagenfurt.

After the war, he served in the division of the Slovenian National Defense Corps (later renamed the Department for the Protection of the People - OZNA), the Yugoslav military service of counterintelligence. He was demobilized in 1946. In 1947 he graduated from the Law Faculty of Ljubljana University. From 1947 to 1956 worked as an expert on economic law in the government of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. In 1956, he was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Zagreb and moved to Belgrade, where he worked for a year as a consultant at the Ministry of Foreign Trade. In 1957, he became a legal consultant to the People's Assembly (Parliament) of Slovenia. In 1959, under the Eisenhower Scholarship, he exchanged internships at the University of Philadelphia for ten months.

In 1962, he began teaching in the specialty “Public Administration” at the Law Faculty of the University of Ljubljana. During this period, he began to openly express his criticism of certain aspects of the Yugoslav communist system, especially excessive centralism and the not entirely successful economic integration of various regions of Yugoslavia. In 1963, he was expelled from the Communist Party. Continuing to teach at the university, he became increasingly popular among students, expanding the curriculum through non-Marxist social theories, in particular, Max Weber's theory. Unlike many university teachers, he was skeptical of the student movement in 1968-1972.

After 1968, he published many articles criticizing the creation of large business systems in Yugoslavia, frequent changes in the regulatory framework and the lack of clear responsibilities in decision-making processes. In 1976, he was fired from the university and was forbidden to publish articles for five years. In 1980, he began working with the opposition magazine Nova Revija. In early 1988, he was invited to speak in the European Parliament, his speech caused a scandal in Yugoslavia, as he proposed to block all economic assistance to the socialist countries of Eastern Europe in order to force them to carry out economic and political reforms.

In 1989, he was one of the founders of the Slovenian Democratic Union, one of the first opposition parties to the communist regime in Slovenia. After the victory of the opposition in the first free elections in Slovenia in 1990, he was elected chairman of the National Assembly of Slovenia. As a speaker of parliament and a member of the Constitutional Committee, he played a decisive role in the adoption of the new Slovenian Constitution. During this period, he insisted on creating a solid legal basis for Slovenia’s independence from Yugoslavia.

After a split in the Slovenian Democratic Union, he went to the Democratic Party, led by Dmitry Rupel . In 1992, he was re-elected to the National Assembly and became chairman of the Secret Services Control Committee. In 1993, he quit the party, remaining an independent deputy until the 1996 election.

In 1996, he unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Ljubljana with the support of a coalition of center-right parties. In 2002, he unsuccessfully ran for president of Slovenia as an independent candidate.

Until May 2012, he was president of the Slovenian branch of the Pan-European Union .

• “Our future development”, Ljubljana, 1961
• The Ways of Progress, Ljubljana, 1961
• “What is the economic system?” Ljubljana, 1963
• "Companies and society", Ljubljana, 1972
• "Management", Ljubljana, 1981
• "Reality and Illusion", Maribor, 1986
• “Fateful decisions”, Ljubljana, 1988
• "Crossing of the Red Sea", Ljubljana, 1993
• “Prisoners of the Past”, Ljubljana, 1995
• “Slovenia and European Problems”, Ljubljana, 1996
• “Democracy and the crisis of our constitutional institutions”, Ljubljana, 1998
• “The destroyed harmony of the world”; Dobrolyubov, 2003
• “At new crossroads”; Cele, 2006
• “Birth of a nation”, Radovlitsa, 2007
• Slovenes and the Future, Radovlitsa, 2009
• “Foundations of our statehood”, Ljubljana, 2012

• http://www.primorske.si/Novice/Slovenija/Umrl--je-France-Bucar
• https://english.sta.si/2189338/france-bucar-a-founding-father-of-slovenian-democracy-dies