The Republicans, as the peasant party was called officially, became the backbone of government coalitions until the disruption of the republic; from its ranks came Antonín Švehla (prime minister 1921–29) and his successors.


Political consolidation
Foreign relations were largely determined by wartime agreements. Czechoslovakia adhered loyally to the League of Nations. Treaties with Yugoslavia and Romania gave rise to the Little Entente. France was the only major power that concluded an alliance with Czechoslovakia (January 1924). Relations with Italy, originally friendly, deteriorated after Benito Mussolini's rise to power in 1922. Czech anticlerical feeling precluded negotiation of a concordat with the papacy until 1928, when an agreement was worked out providing for settlement of the most serious disputes between church and state. It was Germany, however, that most strongly influenced the course of Czechoslovak foreign affairs. The relations between the two neighbours improved slightly in 1925 after the Locarno Pact, a series of agreements among the powers of western Europe to guarantee peace. In the milder climate of the late 1920s, a third party, the Social Democrats, joined the German activists. Attempts to change the attitude of the Slovak Populists met with partial success. Reorganization of public administration in 1927, while marking a retreat from rigid centralism, did not go far enough to meet demands for Slovak autonomy. Hlinka and his chief collaborator, Josef Tiso, tenaciously pursued the program of decentralization and only at short intervals supported the Prague government. When the impact of the Great Depression reached Czechoslovakia, soon after 1930, the highly industrialized German-speaking districts were hit more severely than the predominantly agricultural lowlands. The ground was thus prepared for the rise of militant nationalism. Parties supported by middle-class German voters and persisting in opposition to Prague gained in popularity and were encouraged by Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany. In October 1933 Konrad Henlein, a supporter of Hitler and head of the politically active Sudeten Turnverband gymnastics society, launched his Sudeten German Home Front. Professing loyalty to the democratic system, he asked for recognition of the German minority as an autonomous body. In 1935 Henlein changed the name of his movement to the Sudeten German Party so as to enable its active participation in the parliamentary election (May 1935). The party captured nearly two-thirds of the Sudeten German vote and became a political force second only to the Czech Agrarians.


Moving toward the abyss
A tense interlude of little more than two years followed the landslide victory of the Sudeten Germans.