Vasko Simoniti

Simoniti was born in Ljubljana as the son of the renowned composer and choir leader Rado Simoniti who had moved to the Slovenian capital from the Goriška region in the 1930s in order to escape the violent policies of Fascist Italianization in the Julian March.

[1] After a short period of work in the public administration of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, he started teaching at the Ljubljana University in 1981.

In the late 1990s, he was the co-author, together with the writer and public intellectual Drago Jančar and journalist and historian Alenka Puhar, of the exhibition "The Dark Side of the Moon" (Slovene: Temna stran meseca) on the authoritarian and totalitarian elements of the Communist dictatorship in the former Yugoslavia, with an emphasis on Slovenia.

He first became actively involved in politics in the parliamentary elections of 2000, when he ran unsuccessfully for the Slovenian National Assembly on the list of the Social Democratic Party of Slovenia (now known as the Slovenian Democratic Party).

In 2004, he was among the co-founders of the liberal conservative civic platform Rally for the Republic (Slovene: Zbor za republiko).