The city's fate was once again solved by a combination of force and diplomacy. Despite the insisting requests by the Fiuman government in exile collaboration with the partisans and calls to respect the city-state's internationally recognized sovereignty, and despite the generous initial promises of full independence and later of extensive autonomy for the city-state by the Yugoslav authorities (the locals were promised various degrees of autonomy at different moments during the war,most notably the possibility to be a state of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), the city was annexed by Yugoslavia and incorporated as part of the federal state of Croatia. All the many voices of dissent within the population were silenced in the 12 months following the end of the war. The situation created by the Yugoslav forces on the ground was eventually formalised by the Paris peace treaty between Italy and the Allies on 10 February 1947, despite the complaints by the last democratically-elected government and its president-in-exile Riccardo Zanella, and the attempts by experienced Italian foreign minister Carlo Sforza to uphold the previous Wilsonian plans for a multicultural Free State solution, with a local headquarters for the newly created United Nations. Once the change to Yugoslav sovereignty was formalised, and in particular in the years leading to the Trieste Crisis of 1954, fifty-eight thousand of the 66,000 inhabitants of the city were gradually pushed to either emigrate (they became known in Italian as "esuli" or the "exiled ones" from Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia) or endure a harsh oppression by the new Yugoslav Communist regime during the first decades of its existence. The Yugoslav communist party opted for a very Stalinist approach in solving the local ethnic question, in particular after the Autonomist-sympathisers gained massive support in the first local elections held on the city's territory between 1945 and 1946.