meeting chaired by Prince Paul. Stojadinović rejected Maček's demands for a federation, and instead preferred that Maček establish ties with Serbian opposition leaders in order to divide Yugoslav politics into two blocs that would transcend ethnicity, language and religion. One bloc would be a federalist bloc and another bloc would be unitarist, which Stojadinović saw as the solution to Yugoslavia's problems of unity as it would create pan-Yugoslav ties that would ultimately weaken the prevailing ties of language, ethnicity and religion. Stojadinović tried to make himself the "national" leader of the Serbs in a way comparable to how Maček was viewed as the "national" leader of the Croats, Father Korošec as the "national" leader of the Slovenes and Spaho as the "national" leader of the Bosnian Muslims, but the heterogeneous values of the Serb voters caused the failure of his bid to be the Serb "national leader". The fact that the Serbs were the largest single ethnic group in Yugoslavia meant that Serb voters did not feel the need to rally around a single "national" leader in the same way the minorities - who felt that they could not afford disunity and tended to vote for one party - did. Negotiations with Axis powers In March 1937, Stojadinović told Raymond Brugère, the French minister in Belgrade, that France was secure behind the Maginot Line, but the construction of the West Wall meant that the French Army would probably stay behind the Maginot Line if Germany should attack any of France's allies in Eastern Europe, which led him to the conclusion that Yugoslavia must not "provoke" Germany in any possible way. Without informing France, Czechoslovakia or Romania, Stojadinović opened negotiations in the winter of 1936-37 for an Italo-Yugoslav treaty intended to resolve all of the outstanding problems between the two countries. On 25 March 1937, the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, arrived in Belgrade to sign the treaty alongside Stojadinović. Under the terms of the Italo-Yugoslav treaty, Italy promised to rein in the Ustasha; respect the borders of Yugoslavia; and accept Yugoslavia's membership in the Little Entente, the League of Nations and the Balkan pact in exchange for which Yugoslavia accepted Albania as being in the Italian sphere of influence. Although Stojadinović did not formally repudiate either alliance with France or the Little Entente, the Italo-Yugoslav treaty brought Yugoslavia much closer to the Axis powers and did much to weaken