Ante Pavelić
Political rise

During World War I, Pavelić played an active role in the Party of Rights. As an employee and friend of its leader Horvat, he often attended important party meetings, taking over Horvat's duties when he was absent. In 1918, Pavelić entered the party leadership and its Business Committee. After the unification of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs with the Kingdom of Serbia on 1 December 1918, the Party of Rights held a day of public protest claiming that the Croatian people were against having a Serbian king, and that their highest state authorities had not agreed to unification. Further, the party expressed their wish for a Croatian republic in a program from March 1919, signed by president of the party, Vladimir Prebeg and Pavelić. At the 1921 local elections in Zagreb, Pavelić was elected member of the city assembly. In the name of the party, he contacted Nikola Pašić, the Yugoslav Prime Minister and member of the People's Radical Party, with the goal of weakening the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS), the dominant Croatian party in the interwar period.

Pavelić was a member of the Frankovci faction of the Party of Rights. Ivica Peršić, a Croatian politician from the competing Milinovci faction, wrote in his memoir how Pavelić's 1921 election significantly raised the standing of his law office in Zagreb – a number of rich Jewish clients paid him to obtain Yugoslav citizenship, and Pavelić subsequently started to make frequent visits to Belgrade, where he would procure those documents through his increasing number of connections to the members of the ruling People's Radical Party.

In 1921, 14 Party of Rights members, including Pavelić, Ivo Pilar and Milan Šufflay, were arrested for anti-Yugoslav activities, for their alleged contacts with the Croatian Committee, a Croatian nationalist organization that was based in Hungary at the time. Pavelić acted as the defence lawyer at the subsequent trial and was released.

On 12 August 1922, in St. Mark's Church, Zagreb, Pavelić married Maria Lovrenčević. They had three children, daughters Višnja and Mirjana and son Velimir. Maria was part Jewish through her mother's family and her father, Martin Lovrenčević, was a member of the Party of Rights and a well-known journalist.

Later Pavelić became vice-president of the Croatian Bar Association, the professional body representing Croatian lawyers.

In his speeches to the Yugoslav Parliament he opposed Serbian nationalism and spoke in favor of Croatian independence. He was active with the youth of the Croatian Party of Rights and began contributing to the Starčević and Kvaternik newspapers.

Serbian members of the Yugoslav Parliament disliked him and when a Serbian member said "Good night" to him in parliament, Pavelić responded:

Gentleman, I will be euphoric when I will be able to say to you "good night". I will be happy when all Croats can say "good night" and thank you, for this "party" we had here with you. I think that you will all be happy when you don't have Croats here any more.

In 1927, Pavelić became the vice president of the party.

In June 1927, Pavelić represented Zagreb County at the European Congress of Cities in Paris. When he was returning from Paris, he visited Rome and submitted a memorandum in the name of HSP to the Italian ministry of foreign affairs in which he offered to cooperate with Italy in dismembering Yugoslavia. In order to obtain Italian support for Croatian independence, the memorandum effectively made any such Croatia 'little more than an Italian protectorate'. The memorandum also stated that the Party of Rights recognised the existing territorial settlements between Italy and Yugoslavia, thus giving up all Croatian claims to Istria, Rijeka, Zadar and the Adriatic islands which Italy had annexed after World War I. These areas contained between 300,000 and 400,000 Croats. Further, the memorandum also agreed to cede the Bay of Kotor and Dalmatian headlands of strategic importance to Italy, and agreed that a future Croatia would not establish a navy.

As the most radical politician of the Croatian Bloc, Pavelić sought opportunities to internationalize the "Croatian question" and highlight Yugoslavia's unsustainability. In December 1927, Pavelić defended four Macedonian students in Skopje who were accused of belonging to the Macedonian Youth Secret Revolutionary Organization founded by Ivan Mihailov. During the trial, Pavelić accused the court of setting them up and stressed the right to self-determination. This trial received public attention in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.

Following his election as a member of the Croatian Bloc in the 1927 election, Pavelić became his party's liaison with Nikola Pašić. He was one of two elected Croatian Bloc candidates alongside Ante Trumbić, one of the key politicians in the creation of a Yugoslav state. From 1927 until 1929, he was part of the minuscule delegation of the Party of Rights in the Yugoslav Parliament.

In 1927, he secretly contacted the fascist dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini, and presented his separatist ideas to him. Pavelić proposed an independent Greater Croatia that should cover the entire historical and ethnic area of the Croats. In mid-1928, the leaders of the Croatian Bloc, Trumbić and Pavelić, addressed the Italian consul in Zagreb to gain support for the Croatian struggle against regime of King Alexander. On 14 July, they received a positive response, after which Pavelić maintained contact.

Historian Rory Yeomans claimed that there are indications that Pavelić had been considering the formation of some kind of nationalist insurgency group as early as 1928. After the assassination of Croatian politicians in the National Assembly, of which he was an eyewitness, Pavelić joined the Peasant-Democratic Coalition and started to publish a magazine called Hrvatski domobran in which he advocated Croatian independence. His political party radicalised after the assassination. He found support in the Croatian Rights Republican Youth (Hrvatska pravaška republikanska omladina), a youth wing of the Party of Rights led by Branimir Jelić. On 1 October 1928 he founded an armed group with the same name, an act through which he openly called on Croatians to revolt. This group trained as part of a legal sport society. Yugoslav authorities declared the organization illegal and banned its activities.
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