 During the communist regime of Josip Broz Tito, Pučnik was one of the most outspoken Slovenian critics of dictatorship and lack of civil liberties in Yugoslavia.He was imprisoned for a total of seven years, and later forced into exile.After returning to Slovenia in the late 1980s, he became the leader of the Democratic Opposition of Slovenia, a platform of democratic parties that defeated the communists in the first free elections in 1990 and introduced a democratic system and market economy to Slovenia.