1948 Yugoslavian Federal Election (Free Yugoslavia)

Overview
The 1948 elections, conducted with banate-based proportional representation, were the first truly free elections in Yugoslavia since 1927 and, although boycotted by the Communists, they went off without a hitch. The clear winner was the right-wing Serbian Radical Party, which dominated the Serb vote in most Serbian-dominated regions except the major cities of Belgrade and Novi Sad. However, the constitution demanded that any government must consist of Serb, Croat, and Slovene ministers. Thus, in an effort to secure a right-wing government, the Serbian Radical party led by Božidar Purić aligned itself with the center-right Croatian Peasant's Party of Vladko Maček and the conservative-liberal Slovene People's Party to form the first government of the right-wing "Blue and Green" conservative coalition. Supported by the Montenegrin Federalists and the ethnic Hungarian Magyars party, the government of Prime Minister Purić announced its intention to oversee a period of healing and reconciliation after the trepidations of war.

Background
Operation Clownfish, the Allied landing in Dalmatia in late 1944, was a risky and politically charged move. The Soviets were predictably outraged but British prime minister Winston Churchill thought the operation necessary to maintain the integrity of his “percentages agreement” with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, in which the two leaders agreed to share influence in post-war Yugoslavia, amongst others. Although convincing both the leading Allied generals and US president Franklin D. Roosevelt was no easy task, Churchill persuaded them that it was necessary to stop communism as soon as possible. Coupled with a landing in Greece, the Allied forces quickly routed what few Nazi forces remained in Yugoslavia and by early 1945 controlled about half the country, with the Soviets occupying the rest.

Stalin, although incensed at what he believed to be Churchill’s betrayal of their agreement, recognized that total communist control in Yugoslavia was impossible and given his increasingly confrontational relationship with Yugoslav partisan leader Josip Broz Tito agreed to an American-brokered deal over Yugoslavia. Both Allied and Soviet forces would withdraw in 1946 and a constitutional convention would be called over the future of Yugoslavia, with fresh elections planned in 1948. Tito, however, refused to accept this and threatened to attack both Allied and Soviet troops in the country. By now, Tito was viewed as a threat to the stability of the country and in the Fall of 1945 he found himself arrested by the Soviet NKVD, under charges of sedition.

Feeling betrayed by their former communist allies, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, now leaderless and disorganized, boycotted the constitutional convention of 1946, which was left in the hands of resistance fighters and formerly exiled officials from the pre-war government. The two largest figures of the convention were Croatian leader Vladko Maček and Serb leader Draža Mihailović. Maček considered Mihailović to be a war criminal while Mihailović thought Maček to be a coward and as a result the convention got off to a rough start. Eventually however, the two reached an agreement for the constitution of the Federal Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a new entity distinct from the pre-war unitary state. The Federal Kingdom of Yugoslavia was to be a federal constitutional parliamentary monarchy in which power was shared between the federal government in Belgrade with ten banates, or provinces. The banates were decided as: Slovenia, Croatia-Slavonia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Vojvodina, Kosovo and Macedonia. The division of Croatia into two separate banates caused serious consternation amongst the Croats, which was only mollified by dividing Serbia up between Kosovo, Vojvodina and Serbia proper as well. In the end though, most parties were tolerant of the election and old pre-war political factions, some rebranded, came out of hiding to prepare for the 1948 Federal election and subsequent banate elections.