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J
OZEF
T
ISO
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Republic’.
44
Indeed, his willingness to consider a coalition with a wide
range of parties (non-Catholic, non-Slovak, government-supporting)
suggests that his support for such coalitions was a tactical ploy rather
than a reflection of moderate views.
Moreover, a willingness to cooperate with other parties did not pre-
vent Tiso from rejecting the notion that any other party had the right
to represent the Slovak nation. Indeed, he developed the Christian
Social critique of individualism and class-based movements into an
all-encompassing hostility to democracy that arrived at the same con-
clusions as the corporatist fascist state. He repeatedly denounced all
other political parties in Slovakia as mere representatives of specific
interest groups. He accused them, by their very existence, of under-
mining social cohesion and thereby national unity, and he rejected any
political system that was based on the ‘will of the voters’. Only the
HSLS, he repeatedly declared, had ‘the right to speak in the name of
the Slovak people.’
45
While Slovakia remained part of the centralized Czechoslovak state,
however, Tiso rejected the calls of the ‘radicals’ for an uncompromising
oppositional stance that denied legitimacy to either the Czechoslovak
government or any other political party. Such an estrangement from
the political process, he recognized, would be as futile as the Church’s
earlier detachment from secular society. His thinking was, therefore,
once again conditioned by the old Christian Social call for the Church
to engage with secular society through the political process. As Tiso
himself declared at the HSLS’s 1936 party congress, his advocacy of
negotiations, coalition building and compromise was ‘simply a ques-
tion of tactics’ and these tactics had to ‘fit the conditions of the time
and the needs of the people and the party.’
46
It was, therefore, a dispute
over tactics, not over ideology, that pitted Tiso against the inflexible
‘anti-Czechoslovakism’ of the so-called ‘radical’ wing of the HSLS.
A similar point can be made about Tiso’s attitude towards the Jews.
Although he avoided aggressively antisemitic rhetoric in the period
1920–1938, this should not be seen as anything more than a tacti-
cal recognition that aggressive antisemitism would isolate the HSLS
from the political mainstream. Antisemitism was a core element of the
Christian Social ideology, which criticized Jews as both un-Christian

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