Milan Kučan was the most important Slovenian politician in the twenty-year period from the mid-1980s to the expiry of his presidential term in 2002. This period was characterized by the transition from a single-party to a multi-party system, Slovenia’s attainment of independence, and its involvement in European and other integrations; this period is usually called “the transition”. Even before that time, at a very young age, Kučan was already an important politician; among other things, he was a member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee (CC) of the League of Communists (LC) of Slovenia, the secretary of the Socialist Alliance of the Working People (SAWP), the president of the Republican Assembly, and, at the federal level, a member of the Presidency of the CC of the LC of Yugoslavia. At the first multi-party elections in 1990 he was elected the president of the presidency. After a new constitution had been adopted, he ran for president of the republic and was elected twice. When his second term of office expired in 2002, he retired from politics.