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Citizens of Croatia elect new parliament
Wants to become Prime Minister at the head of an SDP-led government: Zoran Milanovic. photo
© Darko Bandic/AP/dpa
They share a deeply felt enmity. President Milanovic wants to remove Prime Minister Plenkovic from power and rule himself. Now the voters have to decide.
The election campaign was overshadowed by the bitter hostility between President Zoran Milanovic and Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic. Recent polls saw Plenkovic’s conservative Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ) in the lead over the opposition Social Democratic Party (SDP).
President Milanovic wants to become prime minister
President Milanovic, who comes from the SDP, surprisingly announced a month before the election that he wanted to become prime minister at the head of an SDP-led government. As president with a rather limited amount of power, he had approached the extreme right in Croatia with populist rhetoric. He bases his claim to government on the rampant corruption in the state ruled by the HDZ. His crude insults to political opponents as “gangsters,” “stable flies,” and “parasites” earned him the nickname “Croatian Trump.”
Plenkovic has ruled Croatia since 2016, and the HDZ has been in power for 26 of the 33 years since Croatia’s independence. The incumbent head of government continued the expansion of corrupt networks in the state and administration begun by his predecessors. In the almost eight years of his leadership, he lost 30 ministers because of corruption scandals. At the same time, Plenkovic positions himself as pro-Western and pro-European.
Small distance between HDZ and SDP
With the recent appointment of senior public prosecutor Ivan Turudic, who is loyal to the HDZ, he now seems to want to put an end to the fight against corruption and the previously fruitful cooperation with the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. Milanovic was Prime Minister from 2011 to 2015 as the then SDP leader. Since he became president in 2020, he has shown an increasingly nationalist, Corona-denying and pro-Russian attitude. Among other things, he tried in vain to prevent Finland and Sweden from joining NATO.
President Milanovic’s – constitutionally questionable – entry into the election campaign reduced the gap between the HDZ and the SDP in the polls. The coalition options for the two major parties will depend on the election outcome. The right-wing national Most (Brücke), the right-wing extremist homeland movement and the parties of the ethnic minorities are likely to be available as potential coalition partners and majority creators.
Polling stations close at 7 p.m. Meaningful partial results are expected late in the evening.