Original scientific paper
Slavonski Brod and the Act on the Organization of Town Districts from 1895
Branko Ostajmer
Abstract
The preparation of the amendments to the Act on the Organization of Town Districts from 1881 began in the spring of 1894. The Act had been amended before and the amendments introduced in 1886, soon after Dragutin Khuen-Héderváry’s arrival to the Viceroy (Ban) position, introducing centralization and restricting the towns’ autonomy, were particularly important. The announcements of new amendments
in 1894 were received with disapproval by the opposition, who felt that the new amendments would continue the past legislative practice and attempt to restrict the chances of the opposition’s success in town elections even further. Representatives of towns who were denied town status by the new Act were also against it regardless of their political views.
The Government’s primary intent was to use the amendments to approximate the town legislation with the extensive reorganization of the administrative and political system carried out in 1886. They also wanted to eliminate the visible drawbacks of the 1881 Act and disburden the Government by subordinating some of the towns to counties and districts. In this sense the Government’s draft of the Act and the Act’s
final form were far away from the opposition’s forebodings. Fearing that the center was preparing to infringe once again upon the town selfgovernment’s jurisdictions, citizens of Brod stood up against the amendments. The local club of the Party of Right was in charge of the political action in Brod, reasserting
itself as the strongest and the best-organized party organization in Brod. They organized a very successful public citizen assembly at which a resolution was adopted with very clearly formulated demands concerning the new Act on the Organization of Town Districts. Brod’s rightists demanded primarily the town’s autonomy to be further expanded and the election law to be made considerably more democratic. Their demands had no chance of success at the moment and no chance of success in a longer run either.
The new Act subordinated Brod to the County of Požega instead of subordinating it directly to the Government in Zagreb, and the Government made a considerable intervention in the election law by abolishing active voting right for women. However, there was no attempt to restrict the chance of the opposition’s successes in town elections with the latter and the new Act allowed the will of the people to be manifested and the opposition to win the majority at town councils. That was exactly what happened in Brod in the election held in the autumn of 1895 when the Party of Right won a sweeping victory.
Trying to estimate to which extent Brod’s demands and other similar reactions in Ban’s Croatia (Banska Hrvatska) could have influenced the final form of the Act on the Organization of Town Districts is an unthankful task, but there is no doubt that such political actions helped the Party of Right in Brod to grow into the first political power in the town on the Sava.
Keywords
Slavonski Brod; Croatian Party of Right; Act on the Organization of Town Districts (1895)
Hrčak ID:
61608
URI
Publication date:
1.10.2009.
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