Cavid as Finance Minister). He continued Hamidian era anti-Zionist restrictions in Ottoman Palestine, as well as enforce imperial rule in revolting provinces like Albania and Yemen. That year, Louis Rambert, director of the Régie des Tabacs, wrote that Talaat was "the acknowledged head of the Committee of Union and Progress and the Young Turks." Biographer Hans-Lukas Kieser writes that he was under the influence of Bahattin Şakir and Mehmed Nazım before 1908, but after late 1909 he had an increased interest in the new Central Committee member Ziya Gökalp and his more revolutionary and Pan-Turkist ideas. Due to an increasingly toxic political climate, Talaat stepped down as Interior Minister in March 1911 for his fellow committee-man Halil Menteşe. For a short time he was Minister of Post and Telegraph in January 1912. Crisis for the committee In the 1912 election known as the "election of clubs", Union and Progress won a lopsided victory against the Freedom and Accord Party due to widespread employment of electoral fraud and violence. As a result, Freedom and Accord organized a group in the military known as the Savior Officers to bring down the CUP dominated legislature. Talaat urged for Şevket Pasha, who was appointed Minister of War after the 31 March Incident, to resign as in the lead-up to the coup d'état, something he wrote that he regretted once Şevket Pasha did so in support of the Savior Officers. Eventually, pro-CUP Grand Vizier Said Pasha had to acquiesce to the Savior Officers demands, and the parliament was dissolved with a new election to take place in autumn of 1912. It was no longer safe for Unionists to be in the open, and it was plausible that the CUP would be banned by the government. Talaat had to once again lay low, hiding with Midhat Şükrü, Hasan Tahsin, and Cemal Azmi in Tahsin's brother-in-law's house. By 1912 Talaat definitely abandoned the belief that constitutionalism and rule of law could unite the multi-ethnic and fragmented "Ottoman nation", which was the original raison d'être of the Young Turks, and turned to more radical politics. He and other high ranking CUP leaders organized and gave speeches in a pro-war rally against the Balkan nations in Sultanahmet Square before the Balkan Wars broke out. The Savior Officer-backed government of Ahmed Muhtar Pasha fell soon after when the Balkan League achieved decisive victory over the Ottoman Empire in the First