Jože Pučnik

Jože Pučnik (born March 9, 1932 in Črešnjevec, Slovenska Bistrica , † January 12, 2003 in Germany) was a Slovenian politician . He was chairman of the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) from 1989 to 1993 and was one of those who led Slovenia to independence from Yugoslavia .

biography

After completing high school in Maribor , Jože Pučnik studied philosophy and comparative literature at the University of Ljubljana . He was sentenced to prison terms twice for being critical of the government. He then emigrated to West Germany , where he received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1971 .

In 1989 he returned to what was then Yugoslavia and was co-founder and from November 1989 to May 1993 chairman of the Social Democratic Federation of Slovenia (Socialdemokratska zveza Slovenije SZS) , which was renamed the Democratic Party of Slovenia (Slovenska demokratska stranka SDS ) in 1990 . In addition, he became chairman of the DEMOS opposition alliance . Pučnik became a member of the first freely elected National Assembly of Slovenia in 1990 and remained a member of parliament until 1996. In 1990 he stood unsuccessfully as a candidate for DEMOS against Milan Kučan in the presidential elections.

After the collapse of the Peterle government , he was Deputy Prime Minister of Slovenia in the first government under Janez Drnovšek for a few months in 1992 .

In 1997 he retired from politics. Jože Pučnik died on January 12, 2003 at the age of seventy.

Appreciations

In 2006, after his death, he was given clear services to Slovenia and in 2007 the government of Slovenia honored him by naming the international airport of Ljubljana near Brnik after him (Letališče Jožeta Pučnika Ljubljana) .

Web links

• Short curriculum vitae on the occasion of naming the airport (Slovenian)