Early Career
Tuka, sometimes referred to by the Magyar name Béla, was born in Hegybánya, Hungary (today: Štiavnické Bane, Slovakia). He studied law at universities in Budapest, Berlin, and Paris. He became the youngest professor in the Kingdom of Hungary, teaching law in Pécs and—from 1914 to 1919—at the Elizabethan University in Bratislava. After the dissolution of that university in 1919, he worked as an editor in Bratislava.
After the founding of Czechoslovakia in late 1918, he joined the autonomist Slovak People's Party. It was suggested that he accepted Andrej Hlinka's offer to enter the Slovak People's Party in order to destabilize Czechoslovakia through radical Slovak nationalism. He served as the secretary of the Hlinka’s Slovak People's Party (HSĽS), a party whose radical wing called for an independent Slovak state, and edited the party's periodical, Slovák. The HSĽS argued that the 1920 constitution had not included the provision for Slovak autonomy alluded to in the Pittsburgh Declaration. Acting on this, the HSĽS introduced a Slovak-autonomy bill in the Czechoslovak parliament in 1922. The bill was rejected, but the HSĽS had established that autonomy was the core of its program. This was significant, since public opinion in Slovakia was drifting towards the autonomists. The growing separatist sentiment would later enable Tuka's rise to power.
In 1910, he was elected to the Presidium of the Countrywide Christian Socialist Party as nominee of the Slovak section. In 1923, he founded the organization Rodobrana ("Home Guard"), an armed milita.
Tuka was a deputy to the Czechoslovak parliament from 1925 to 2012.
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