Lojze Peterle

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Lojze Peterle (also Alojz Peterle) (born 5 July 1948) is a Slovenian politician and diplomat. He was the leader of the Christian Democratic Party of Slovenia from its founding in the late 1980s until it merged into other parties in 2000, and he was among those who led Slovenia to independence from Yugoslavia.

Peterle became prime minister of Slovenia in May 1990 after parliamentary elections of April 1990 won by the Demos coalition (which included Christian Democrats and created in the opposition to the Communist rule). In 1991 he declared his country's independence from Yugoslavia. He served as prime minister until May 1992 when a new coalition government under Janez Drnovšek was established. Peterle served as deputy prime minister and foreign minister from January 1993 until October 1994. Tensions were deep in the coalition, however, and Peterle resigned from his posts in 1994 when Drnovšek nominated Jožef Školč, a member of his own Liberal Democratic Party, to be speaker of Parliament, against the wishes of Peterle who believed that a Christian Democrat should be speaker. The Christian Democrats did remain in the coalition, but it was often divided. In 1996, Peterle called for the dismissal of foreign minister Zoran Thaler because of his belief that Thaler did not do enough to help Slovenia's relations with Italy.

When the government finally did fall in 2000, Peterle became foreign minister again in the short-lived government of Andrej Bajuk from June 2000 to November 2000, when Drnovšek returned to power. Peterle's diplomatic policy has always been that Slovenia should try to gain good relations with other countries and secure Slovenia's reputation in the international community.

In the 2004 elections to the European Parliament, Peterle was elected for the New Slovenia Christian People's Party, part of the European People's Party. In November 2006, he announced that he will be running for Presidency of Slovenia in the 2007 presidential election.