Maylender. Maylender refused, and Luigi Ossoinack decided to advance the candidacy of the young Riccardo Zanella. Maylender was ousted from public life, and the Autonomist Party replaces its leader with Francesco Vio, who is elected podestà to replace Maylender, on 10 January 1902. Vio was a representative of the moderate current within the Associazione Autonoma, but the man behind the scenes was certainly still Luigi Ossoinack, who continued to finance the party. Although Batthyany (publicly backed by Maylender) won over Zanella, Maylender resigned few months after and withdrew from politics, officially he devoted himself to historical studies and started the monumental "History of the Academies of Italy" a work, published posthumously, of still unmatched scope. Zanella was now entering the scene. Schooled in the Hungarian schools in Fiume, and a graduate from the Commercial Academy in Budapest, possessed the right blend of characteristics: a good command of Hungarian and other languages, a network of friends, knowledge of administration and intellectual and psychological inferiority compared to his sponsors. He will manage to become the most popular Fiuman political leader ever. But there was also a more substantial change: while Maylender was (as Ciotta had previously been) the men of the Party of Government that is the Liberal Party of Deak and Tisza, Zanella felt much closer to the Kossuthian current within the Hungarian political scene. The clash between Liberalism and radicalism in Hungary, was since the 1850s reflected also in Fiume with Gaspare Matcovich as the local leader of the Kossuthists and Giovanni de Ciotta of the Deákist faction. A silent revolution was consumed within the ranks of the autonomists. On 4 April 1902, in the article "Metamorfosi di un partito" on his Voce del popolo, Zanella in an analysis of the political situation in Hungary, depicted the Hungarian Liberal Party as an aristocratic expression of Hungarian national feelings, while the "Party of 1848" is the popular and democratic form of the same. There was no difference in contents or the political project, it was only the external visual manifestation that changed, following the evolution of Hungarian society. Zanella adapted the arguments of Kossuthian populism to the Fiuman situation: claiming that in Fiume increasingly the economy and society was controlled by Hungarians, he mirrored the Kossuthian claims about the Austrian dominance upon Hungary. From the beginnings he will resort to rhetoric borrowed from Italian nationalism and irredentism, anticipated already by his