Prince Regent Paul took the view that he must not change the kingdom from the way that King Alexander had left it so that his son could take possession of it unaltered when he turned 18 in September 1941, and resisted any attempts to revise the 1931 constitution. On 20 August 1939, Paul permitted the prime minister, Dragiša Cvetković, to sign an agreement with Vladko Maček, the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, which created a new Banovina of Croatia with substantial autonomy and a much greater size, covering much of what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, and satisfying at least in part the long-standing demands of the Croats. The agreement was very unpopular with the Serbs, especially when reports emerged that the "prečani" Serbs were being discriminated against by the authorities of the autonomous "banovina". The tense international situation of August 1939 with the Danzig crisis pushing Europe to the brink of war meant Paul wanted to settle one of the more debilitating internal disputes in order to make Yugoslavia more capable of surviving the coming storm. The agreement came at the cost of both Paul and Cvetković being condemned by Serbian public opinion for "selling out" to the Croats, all the more so as many Croats made it clear that they saw the "banovina" of Croatia as only a stepping stone towards independence. The unpopularity of the agreement and the Cvetković government, was one of the reasons for the coup d'état of 27 March 1941 as many Serbs believed that Peter, the son of King Alexander, would continue with his father's centralising policies when he reached his majority.