alternatehistory.com

...Besides Albania, Yugoslavia was the only communist nation in Europe by the 1980s that was not a member of the Warsaw Pact. As such, the end of the threat of Soviet power was not an instant condition for the collapse of communism there, but it was the final condition that lead to the end of the communist monopoly on power in the multi-ethnic Balkan state.

...Following revolts in the republic of Croatia by liberal students in the early 1970s, President Tito set about preparing a new constitution that he felt could keep the six republics that made up Yugoslavia together. Decentralizing certain personal freedoms to the republics, Tito ignored calls for a rotation in office for the presidency (which would take place after his death, for he had been declared president-for-life) and instead planned for a system where his successors would be chosen from the heads of the republics and serve five-year terms, with the mandate that the president's home republic and that of his successor be different. This compromise satisfied enough of the ruling League of Communist leaders that they dutifully followed the constitutional process after Tito's death in 1980 and elected Petar Stambolić of Serbia to succeed him.

Stambolić's presidency (1980-1990) was crucial to the survival of the Yugoslav state. Stambolić moved quickly to react to both nationalistic appeals in the various republics and Western pressure to liberalize in reaction to the dysfunction and eventual death of the Warsaw Pact within his term in office, with US President Dole in particular pushing for Yugoslavia to be squeezed economically to hasten the end of communism there. Ruthlessly cracking down on nationalists that called for various ethnic state's independence, Stambolić's manipulation of the leaders of the party gained him a second term where the leaders who had agreed to Tito's 1974 constitution had felt assured that a five-year informal rotation had been promised.

With Dole's defeat in the 1988 election in the United States, Stambolić got his successor, President Huddleston, to agree to lift the economic sanctions Yugoslavia had received in return for democratization, with free elections to take place in 1992, with the delay being necessary for the transition away from a single-party state towards a democratic republic. When the ban on non-communist parties running in elections was repealed in 1990, the various republics began electing their own leaders.

In 1992, the promised constitutional amendments came into effect, transforming Yugoslavia into a parliamentary democracy. Patterned on the Australian "Washminster" system, the lower house National Assembly allocated deputies by population while the Federal Council granted each republic equal representation, partially as a check on the domination of the state by Serbia or Croatia, the largest two republics by population.



Ivan Stambolić, nephew of the former president, led the Socialist Party of Yugoslavia (SPJ), the successor to the ruling League of Communists of Yugoslavia, to victory on the basis of both his family name and trepidation on the part of many Yugoslav voters on the reliability of the other, untested candidates. Outgoing prime minister Ante Marković's Union of Reform (SR), the liberal alternative that the final Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) prime minister had founded while in office, lost spectacularly despite Western hopes that the reformist would succeed and continue his push towards quick privatization.

The other parties that made it above the five percent threshold were the Christian Democratic Union of Yugoslavia (HDUJ) as well as the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), both parties with religious tinges to their beliefs (HDUJ being nominally a Christian democratic party but operated as a broad-tent center-right to right-wing party while the SDA was a Muslim equivalent and thus only popular in Bosnia and Herzegovina). The Yugoslav People's Party (JLS), a right-wing party led by psychiatrist Radovan Karadžić, the final party to cross the threshold, advocated for the return of Serbian control of the provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo (which doubtlessly neither province nor the other republics would grant) and more centralization and a push for socially conservative rollbacks of holdover SFR laws regarding personal civil liberties.

Nevertheless, the democratic process had succeeded and the Stambolić government (a coalition between the SPJ and SR) took power with a multi-ethnic cabinet, setting the stage for Yugoslavia to cautiously move forward into the future and seek to be part of the larger European community...