Sergei Kraigher

Sergej Kraigher (1969)

Sergej Kraigher ( Cyrillic  Сергеј Крајгер ; born May 30, 1914 in Postojna , Austria-Hungary ; † 2001 in Ljubljana , Slovenia ) was a Yugoslav politician. As chairman of the state presidency, he was head of state of Yugoslavia in 1981/82 .

biography

Sergej Kraigher studied medicine in Ljubljana and Zagreb until 1937, but he never finished his studies. Instead, he made a career as a cadre in the Communist Party , which he joined in 1934. From 1941 he took part in the partisan struggle against the German occupiers; he held various party offices in Lower Styria, Slovenia . After the Second World War he was chairman of the planning commission in Slovenia from 1946 to 1950. In 1951 he went to Belgrade and was initially head of the Yugoslav National Bank until 1953. When Kraigher was elected to the Central Committee of the Union of Communists of Yugoslavia (BdKJ) in 1952, his rise in the party hierarchy began.

1953-1958 he worked as the director of the federal planning institute, which dealt with the construction of the socialist economy. 1958–1963 Kraigher was Minister of Industry before he was elected Vice President of the Federal Chamber of the National Assembly. In 1967 he exchanged this post with that of the President of the Slovenian Parliament, which he held until 1974. In 1969 he was elected to the party presidium. As president of a republic parliament he was ex officio a member of the federal state presidency, which Tito had set up in 1971 by means of a constitutional amendment. In May 1974 Kraigher was elected President of the Republic of Slovenia; he held this office for eight years.

After the death of the important Slovenian politician Edvard Kardelj in February 1979 , Kraigher inherited his functions in party and state: the Slovenian parliament elected him to the eight-member federal state presidium and the central committee of the Slovenian communists sent him as its representative to the central committee of the federal party. Like his predecessor Kardelj, he was considered a sober , not very nationalistic Slovene who was trusted to mediate between the representatives of the Serbs and Croats and Kosovars in the State Presidium.

In 1981, Sergej Kraigher was elected chairman of the state presidency and he was Yugoslav head of state for one year. At the same time, the Slovenian politician headed a commission of experts named after him, which was supposed to submit proposals to the government on how to deal with the economic crisis that had raged in Yugoslavia since the mid-1970s. The commission criticized a number of shortcomings in the socialist economic system and spoke out in favor of market economy reforms without, however, fundamentally calling into question the self-government of workers . The reform proposals made in the final report of the Kraigher Commission in 1983 were hardly implemented.

After leaving the state presidency, Sergej Kraigher retired into private life in 1986. He lived in Ljubljana until his death in 2001.

Works

• Spomini revirskih sekretarjev. Trbovlje 1987. (Memories of the Second World War)
• Implementation of the long-term program of economic stabilization. In: Socialist Theory and Practice. 14: 5, 50-66 (1987).
• Kako iz krize. O dugorocnom programu ekonomske stabilizacije i njegovom ostvarivanju. Zagreb 1985, ISBN 86-343-0116-8 .
• Moč Jugoslavije je v samoupravljanju. Razgovori s Sergejem Kraigherjem. Ljubljana 1984.
• Consistent implementation of economic stabilization. In: Socialist Theory and Practice. 9: 68-80 (1982).
• Za socialistično samoupravno demokracijo. 2 vols. Ljubljana 1980.

Web links

• Slobodan Stankovic: Sergej Kraigher - Yugoslavia's New State President. (Radio Free Europe Background Report May 18, 1981 in: Open Society Archives)

literature

• Klaus-Detlev Grothusen (Ed.): Yugoslavia at the end of the Tito era. Volume 2: Domestic Policy . Munich 1986, ISBN 0-253-34794-7 .
• Tone Poljšak: Sergej Kraigher (Nekrolog). In: Večer . January 20, 2001, p. 2.