The roughly 6% of the population who were neither Czech nor Slovak in the 1980s have had an uneven history in the postwar era. The highly centralized rule of the KSČ undermined the political leverage that the First Republic's multiparty politics had permitted to ethnic minorities. Beyond this, however, the sheer decrease in the German, who before their expulsion had amounted to 3 million citizens, having had played a large role in the area for centuries, as well as the decrease Ukrainian populations of Czechoslovakia would have limited their influence in any event.