Croatia’s incumbent Prime Minister Andrej Plenković won the most votes with his conservative HDZ, but forming a government will not be easy for him. This is the result of Wednesday’s parliamentary election: As the election commission announced on Thursday after counting most of the votes, 34.4 percent of voters voted for the HDZ, giving it 61 of 151 seats – five fewer than in the previous election in July 2020. Whether Plenković can continue to govern the country in the future now depends on whether he manages to find partners for a coalition among the smaller parties – and on his main rival, President Zoran Milanović.
Milanović himself announced in March that he would run as a candidate for his nominally social democratic party, the SDP. The Constitutional Court put a stop to this by ruling that as long as Milanović remained head of state, he could not apply for a seat in parliament, let alone run an election campaign. The president reacted by calling the constitutional judges “illiterate” and “peasants” and that they formed a “gangster gang” together with the government. Milanović renounced his official candidacy, but he still campaigned for the opposition alliance “Rijeke pravde” (“Streams of Justice”) led by his SDP – and tirelessly attacked the ruling HDZ on its greatest weakness: its constant corruption scandals.
Numerous corruption allegations against ministers
Since Croatia seceded from what was then Yugoslavia as an independent state in 1991, the HDZ has ruled the country almost continuously. Plenković has been in office for eight years now, and over the course of his two terms in office he has had to dismiss a total of 30 ministers, most of them due to corruption allegations. The prime minister, who has not yet been directly involved in such scandals, has since passed a law according to which informants who pass on details from judicial investigation files to the media are threatened with up to three years in prison.
He had recently appointed long-serving judge Ivan Turudić as prosecutor general. He made a name for himself at the time by sentencing former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader to ten years in prison for corruption. However, it has been proven that Turudić recently had friendly contacts with criminals himself, which is why President Milanović, after his appointment as Attorney General, railed, in a variation of a well-known saying, that this was the “bucket that causes the cesspool to overflow”.
The president’s election campaign for his SDP was characterized by such pithy statements. Milanović is known not only for his sometimes populist rhetoric, which has earned him the nickname “Croatian Trump”, but also for his closeness to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and for his sometimes Russia-friendly positions – he once described the West’s military support for Ukraine as “deeply immoral” because it unnecessarily prolongs the war. The SDP received 25.4 percent of the vote on Wednesday. Its leader Peđa Grbin said the result was “certainly not what we wanted” but showed that “two thirds of citizens want change and are dissatisfied with what is happening in Croatia, and we will not let them down let”.
Prime Minister and President are enemies of each other
Andrej Plenković said on Thursday that the future government should of course be formed by the election winner, but at the same time he accused President Milanović of a “shameless violation of the constitution” because of his election campaign for the opposition.
The third-placed right-wing party “Domovinski pokret” (“Homeland Movement”), with 9.6 percent, indicated its willingness to talk to the HDZ, while the fourth-placed green-liberal “Možemo!” (“We can!”) declared, however, that he wanted to support a minority government led by the SDP if necessary. The Možemo! candidate Sandra Benčić called on Thursday “all political actors from left to right” to commit to the common goal of “destroying the corrupt Kraken” and not to form a coalition with the HDZ. The liberal-conservative party “Most” (“Bridge”) came in fifth place with eight percent, whose leader Božo Petrov announced before the election that the HDZ should “be sent into opposition.”
According to the Croatian constitution, the president, Plenkovic’s arch-rival Zoran Milanović, decides who gets the task of forming a government. The talks between the possible coalition partners are likely to last weeks to months, and new elections are also conceivable.