Czechoslovak parliamentary election, 1929

Parliamentary elections were held in Czechoslovakia on 27 October 1929. The result was a victory for the Republican Party of Agricultural and Smallholder People, which won 46 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 24 seats in the Senate. Voter turnout was 90.2% in the Chamber election and 78.8% for the Senate.

The 1929 election took place at a juncture of relative prosperity, just before the Great Depression. The rightward shift of the 1925 election was reversed, moderate centre-left groups (Social Democrats and Czechoslovak National Socialists) increased their vote shares whilst the Communist Party suffered a set-back.

The Communist Party was the sole multinational political party in the country at the time. It had emerged as a major force in the 1925 election and had around 150,000 members in 1928. In 1929 leadership shifted to a younger generation and a major purge of party ranks took place.

The Jewish Party, which had failed to win representation in 1925, managed to win two seats through an alliance with three Polish parties. Its deputies were Ludvík Singer from Bohemia and Julius Reiz from Slovakia.

General Radola Gajda's list ('League against Bound Tickets'), which called for the formation of a corporativist state, failed to make a major headway but won three seats (Gajda, Jiří Stříbrný and Karel Pergler). Gajda's political line was fascist, anti-Semitic and anti-German.

In Slovakia, the Hlinka's Slovak People's Party resigned from the coalition government on October 8, 1929. The move followed a long controversy around the legal case of the party newspaper editor Vojtech Tuka, who was sentenced for espionage and treason on October 5, 1929. The Tuka affair had resulted in an internal rift in the party, with the expelled anti-Tuka faction (led by Juriga and Tománek) setting up their own Juriga's Slovak People's Party.

In the election the party saw a decline compared to the 1925 vote and it went from 23 seats in 1925 to 19 seats. One interpretation is that two years of government participation without achieving Slovak autonomy had weakened the party. Moreover the party had an ambiguous stance during the Tuka affair. The Juriga faction failed to make any impact in the election.

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