All-national coalition

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Allnational Coalition (Czech: všenárodní koalice ) is the name for a coalition-like union of several parties in Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1926, which in the period after the founding of the state in October 1918 established the governments or influenced their formation.

Origin and Effect

The attribute “allnational” was intended to express that the most important parties from across the country took part in this union. The parties involved were:

some of them were renamed several times in the period after 1918.

The five parties represented were among the most important and largest in Czechoslovakia and also represented the most important currents of the political spectrum of the time. However, the claim to represent the majority of the population could not be fulfilled. The Czech political parties (and in retrospect also the Slovak ones) placed the existence of the national Czechoslovak state in the foreground, while the other minority parties did not demand this and in some cases hoped for other solutions. Above all, the German parties maneuvered themselves into the opposition, which had a centripetal effect on the Czech parties, which seized the national question as the common denominator and were first able to suppress their political differences.

For this reason, the not negligible German parties (Social Democracy, Agrarian Party, People's Party) were not represented in the coalition until the mid-twenties, although in Bohemia and Moravia they had around a third (and in relation to the whole of Czechoslovakia almost a quarter) of the Represented the population. In some cases, however, they were indirectly involved in the decisions through their Czech "sister parties"; For example, the German Federation of Farmers was able to participate through the Czech Agricultural Party. The local parties in Carpathian Ukraine and the parties of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia have not gained any major importance.

Parties from the fringes of the political spectrum were not represented in the coalition: the Czech extreme right never gained any significance; the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia , which was only founded in May 1921 and which became the second strongest party after the Agrarian Party in the parliamentary elections in November 1925 with 13% of the vote and 20 seats, only played a role after the collapse of the All-National Coalition.

The fragmentation of the party landscape was inherited from the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy: 22 candidate lists took part in the parliamentary elections of 1920 in Czechoslovakia, of which 16 won seats and only three were able to reach more than 10 percent of the votes - similar to 1911.

Council of five and the end

In order to be able to better coordinate the work of the government in the years after the founding, when the first political crises arose , a so-called committee was formed in 1921 on the initiative of the chairman of the agricultural party, Antonín Švehla , from each of these five parties “Council of Five” (Pětka), where the important discussions took place and preliminary decisions were made before they were discussed in the government or in parliament. Although this made government work more effective, it did so at the expense of transparency. The council was later expanded to six or eight representatives (and parties).

As early as 1925, however, the differences in the coalition came to light, causing the coalition to break up and new elections were held. The five coalition parties lost their parliamentary majority. The agricultural politician Švehla then succeeded in making the coalition capable of acting again by including the trade party in the coalition (and in the Council of Six, renamed from then on), but in spring 1926 the coalition finally failed and broke up.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Masaryk a velká pětka, an expert talk by the TV station ČT24 on July 23, 2008, online copy at: www.ceskatelevize.cz/ct24 / ... (Czech)
  2. ↑ Information from the Czech Statistical Office, online at: www.czso.cz / ... (PDF; 90 kB)
  3. ↑ Z historie Senátu ČSR (První volební období - 1920 - 1925), materials of the Senate of the Czech Republic, online at: www.senat.cz/informace / ... (Czech)
  4. ↑ Ladislav Lipscher, Constitution and Political Administration in Czechoslovakia: 1918-1939, online at: books.google.de / ... , p. 119
  5. ↑ Martina Winkler , Karel Kramář (1860-1937), Oldenbourg, Munich 2002, pp. 301f., Online at: books.google.de / ...

swell

  • Období první republiky 1918 - 1938 (period of the first republic 1918 - 1938), online at: www.vlada.cz/.../historie (entire text available as PDF), website of the government of the Czech Republic, history of the government office , Czech, accessed January 22, 2013
  • Z historie Senátu ČSR (From the history of the Senate of the Czech Republic), materials of the Senate of the Czech Republic, online at: www.senat.cz/informace / ... (Czech)