Vlastimil Tusar

Vlastimil Tusar

Vlastimil Tusar (born November 28, 1880 in Prague , † March 22, 1924 in Berlin ) was a Czech social democratic politician and second prime minister of Czechoslovakia .

Life

From 1903 Tusar worked as an editor of the social democratic weekly magazine Rovnosti in Brno , whose editor-in-chief he became in 1908 and which he converted into a daily newspaper. In the elections to the Austrian Imperial Council in 1911, he was elected a member of the Czech Social Democratic Party , where he remained until the end of the monarchy . In the first years of the war he was one of the representatives of pro-Austrian activism. In December 1914 he attended a meeting of Moravian politicians with Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk before he went into exile . Masaryk's efforts to get support from the Social Democrats for his demand for an independent state of Czechs and Slovaks also paid off. During the war, Tusar became an advocate of Masaryk's autonomy and supporter, and from 1918 he was a member of the Czechoslovak National Committee . As an expert on Viennese politics, he informed Alois Rašín on October 27, 1918 that now was the best time to declare independence. After the establishment of Czechoslovakia , Tusar became a member of parliament, but remained in Vienna as a negotiator with the newly founded Republic of Austria , where he mainly negotiated border issues.

On July 8, 1919, Tusar succeeded Karel Kramář as Prime Minister of a coalition government of the Social Democrats with the Agrarian Party. The government resigned due to the entry into force of the 1920 Constitution and Tusar was able to form a government again after winning the parliamentary elections in 1920 . As a result, there was turbulence within the party due to the strengthening of the Marxist wing, which Tusar tried to push back. The government resigned on September 15, 1920. On May 14, 1921, the Communist Party split from the Social Democratic Party. Tusar was in poor health, he resigned his mandate in 1921 and became ambassador to Berlin, where he died in 1924.

literature

• Zdeněk Kárník : Vlastimil Tusar. Novinář, politics, diplomat (= Knižnice sociáního demokrata. 1). Česká strana sociálně Demokratická, Prague 2005, ISBN 80-239-7703-2 (Czech).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Roland J. Hoffmann: TG Masaryk and the Czech question. Volume 1: National ideology and political activity until the failure of the German-Czech attempt at reconciliation of February 1909 (= publications of the Collegium Carolinum. 58). Oldenbourg, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-486-53961-2 .