The house my father built

To the electors of District IX, and to the Assembly: I have this week told the officers of Blue Dawn that I will not seek re-election in May. I owe the district a plain explanation, and I owe it to my father’s memory to give it without evasion.

When I came to the Assembly in 1952 I came as a constitutionalist, not as a partisan. My father spent the best years of his life writing the settlement of 1921, and I have never believed it to be a policy to be adjusted whenever it becomes inconvenient. It is the frame within which every policy must be made. When the chamber voted to waive the Faith Restriction Clause for District X, it did not amend an article. It accepted the principle that the Constitution may be traded for quiet. I voted against the Treaty of Brod Moravice, and I would vote against it again.

I am aware of the company I kept in that division. The Sons of Kresimir and the Vjetrusa benches stood with me, and I am told this makes me their man. It does not. I have no wish to govern by the severities of the last decade any more than by the accommodations of this one. I wish only to govern within the law that was given to us. A man may share a lobby without sharing a creed.

I respected Luka Matar, who knew what the Republic was and did not apologise for it. I cannot say the same of those who have succeeded him. The present leadership has made accommodation its whole programme, and has begun to mistake the avoidance of difficulty for the art of government. I do not accuse the Chair of bad faith; I say only that I will not stand again beside men who treat the founding settlement as an obstacle to be managed. To do so would be to lend my name, and my father’s, to a thing neither of us would recognise.

I leave with affection for the district that sent me here. Decelska is a district of two souls — the foundry and the seminary, the engine and the altar — and I have tried to be useful to both. I thank the men and women of District IX for ten years of patience with an engineer who was never a natural politician.

I shall go back to my drafting table, and to work that keeps its shape. The Republic will outlast this Parliament as it has outlasted worse. My father’s house has been altered in ways I do not like, but it still stands, and I will not be the man who sets a match to it.

Josip Novak · Sinj, April 1962