ABSTRACT
The many political parties which existed in Eastern Europe before 1939 can be roughly divided into four types, bourgeois democratic, peasant, Marxist and fascist. This chapter presents a brief summary of the part played by the most important parties from these four categories. The Bulgarian bourgeois democratic parties were already rather weak by the end of the First World War. Greek politics were dominated by two bourgeois democratic parties, Liberals and Populists, commonly known as Republicans and Royalists. The Slovene People’s Party was partly bourgeois, partly peasant and partly fascist, was always strongly clerical and nationalist, and to the end also contained some genuinely democratic elements. Nationalism and anti-liberalism naturally inclined the Slovak People’s Party leaders towards fascism. Inevitably the leadership of their parties was assumed by people who had the right education and experience for political debates and journalism—lawyers, teachers and Writers.
