A parliamentarian who carried constitutional politics into the Liberation Movement
He presided over the Second Session of AVNOJ in 1943, where the decision to form New Yugoslavia was taken.
Ivan Ribar was a Croatian lawyer and Yugoslavist whose career connected parliamentary politics in the kingdom with the anti-fascist Liberation Movement. As president of the Constituent Assembly in 1920 and an advocate for communist defendants under dictatorship, he carried a constitutional and oppositional tradition into wartime politics. As chair of AVNOJ and later head of Yugoslavia’s collective state presidency, he gave the new order an institutional face while its political foundations were being remade. The loss of both sons in the war marked the personal cost of that passage between political traditions.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1906Co-founded the Croatian Progressive Democratic Party; began legal practice
- 1918Member of the central committee of the National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs
- 1919Vice-president of the Provisional People’s Presidency of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes
- 1920–1922President of the Constituent Assembly and National Assembly of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes
- 1942–1945Chair of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ)
- 1945–1953President of the Presidium of Yugoslavia’s National Assembly, the collective head of state
- 1960Retired from political life
Related historical events
Defending the Accused and the Popular Front Idea (1929-1941)
After King Alexander's dictatorship was proclaimed on 6 January 1929 and until 1941, Ribar defended dozens of accused communists before the State Court for the Protection of the State. Among those he represented were Svetozar Vukmanović, Ivan Milutinović, Moša Pijade, Vladimir Bakarić, and his own oldest son, Ivo Lola Ribar. After the 1935 parliamentary elections, in which the government list took 82 percent of the vote against 18 percent for the united opposition, he proposed forming a popular front on the French model and, with fellow lawyers, campaigned in Serbia for a People's Freedom Front; his son Ivo Lola, then a first-year law student, accompanied him. His activity as a member of the United Opposition brought him into conflict with his own party and led to his expulsion from the Democratic Party and the United Opposition in 1938, after which he worked for the creation of a Popular Front. In 1939 he took part in organizing the Society of Friends of the USSR and served as its president. The courtroom defense of communist defendants and the popular-front project together formed the link that moved him from parliamentary politics in the kingdom into the Liberation Movement.