During the communist regime of Josip Broz Tito, he was one of the most outspoken Slovenian critics of dictatorship and lack of civil liberties in SFR Yugoslavia.

His family had supported the Liberation Front of the Slovenian People during World War II: his older brother Ivan was an anti-Nazi resistance fighter in the Yugoslav Partisan movement.

Because of some critical thoughts published in the high school paper Iskanja (Quests) he was prohibited from taking his final exam.

After completing the military service, he took the final exam, passed it and enrolled at the University of Ljubljana, where he studied philosophy and comparative literature, graduating in 1958.

While living in Ljubljana, he became involved with a group of young intellectuals, known as the Critical generation, which tried to open a space for public debate and challenged the rigid cultural policies of the Titoist regime in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia.

Among Pučnik's closest collaborators from that period were the literary historian Taras Kermauner, sociologist Veljko Rus, and poet Veno Taufer.

In the late 1980s, he became an open admirer of the Social Democratic leader of Lower Saxony Gerhard Schröder, later chancellor of Germany, whom he took as his main role model for his subsequent political activity.

The text was written as the response to the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts of 1986, and set the grounds for a political opposition to the communist regime.

Pučnik's article was centred on issues of democratization and political plurality, and openly stressed the need for Slovenia's full sovereignty in order to secure such development.

In the elections of 1992, the Social Democratic Party of Slovenia suffered a complete defeat, gaining a mere 3.4% of the vote, barely securing the entry into the Parliament.

During this time, he led a parliamentary commission to clarify political responsibility for the summary executions perpetrated by the communist regime in Slovenia after World War II .

After 1996, he retired from active politics, but remained honorary president of the Social Democratic Party of Slovenia and continued to voice his opinion on matters of public interest.

He also criticized the political transition to democracy in general, especially the insufficient implementation of the rule of law, the widespread corruption and the maintenance of the power networks from the previous regime.

The decision was criticized by some,[14] including the then President of Slovenia Janez Drnovšek who publicly expressed his respect for Pučnik, but disagreed with the renaming of the airport after him.

[18][19] At the initiative of Milan Zver, the European Parliament announced on 11 June 2018 that a conference room will bear the name of Jože Pučnik.

After his first release from jail in 1963, he met Irena Žerjal, a young Slovene author from Trieste, Italy, who studied Slavic philology in Ljubljana.