Radical Party

(Radikalna Stranka), a Serbian bourgeois political party founded in 1881. N. Pašić, one of the party’s founders, became its main leader. Based mainly on the petite bourgeoisie and the peasantry, the Radical Party opposed the rule of the house of Obrenović. The party was in power from 1889 to 1892 and from 1904 to 1908; it also held power from time to time up until 1929, either by itself or in a coalition.

By the late 19th century, the Radical Party had become a party of the big Serbian bourgeoisie. During the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 and World War I, the party’s foreign policy was oriented toward tsarist Russia, and afterward, during the first years of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, toward France. The Radical Party considered the unification of all southern Slavs around the Kingdom of Serbia to be its main goal and sought hegemony over the entire region for Serbia.

In 1929, the Radical Party was outlawed by the government, along with the other political parties of Yugoslavia. In 1935 the party joined the bourgeois United Opposition, which in turn became part of a formal bloc among opposition parties in 1937–39. Representatives of the Radical Party were members of the government during March-April 1941.