Yugoslavia: Canceling the Rubber Stamp

One of the enduring comforts for a Communist political boss is instant ap proval of his fiats. No sooner does he promulgate a law than a “people’s parliament” affixes its rubber stamp to it. But in the new brand of Communism being pushed in Yugoslavia, things are no longer quite so comfortable. Party “guidance,” not “commandism,” is the order of the day, and top Communist Theoretician Edvard Kardelj not long ago went so far as to emphasize that “it is important that state organs be responsible to those who elect them.”

So it was that Janko Smole, president of the executive council of the Yugoslav state of Slovenia, found himself confronted with noisy objections fortnight ago in the regional legislature. He was trying to push through a bill streamlining the Slovenian health-insurance bureaucracy—for which over half of the deputies worked and thus were reluctant to see reorganized. Speaker after speaker rose to denounce Smole’s proposed law. Tolerantly, the president let the deputies rant and rave, confident that when all was said, the party’s will would be done as usual. But when he called for a vote, the measure, to his astonishment, was voted down 44 to 11.

The stunned Smole countered this dastardly democratic behavior with an old Western parliamentary trick of his own. In a denouement without precedent in the Communist world, he and his executive council resigned—on the grounds that they had lost a no-confidence vote. The Parliament hastily convened to ask Smole & Co. to stay on as a caretaker government until a new one could be elected—when and how, no one quite knew. Smole himself set to work lobbying like any Western politician for enough support to get the bill passed on a second try. The shudder from such a convulsive exercise of Yugoslavia’s new freedoms brought Marshal Tito himself to Slovenia for a long business lunch with Smole under the ironic guise of a “routine medical checkup.” Rediscovering politics Western-style, the Slovenes were by and large delighted with themselves. “Isn’t it a mess?” asked one official with a smile. “Isn’t it a refreshing mess?”