Extrapolations
Governing party in Croatia ahead in parliamentary elections
Croatian President Zoran Milanovic casts his vote at a polling station in Zagreb. photo
© Darko Bandic/AP
Despite allegations of corruption, Croatia’s bourgeois HDZ party led by Prime Minister Plenkovic remains the strongest force. Head of state Milanovic, who wanted to become head of government for the Social Democrats, loses.
The bourgeois Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic could after the parliamentary elections Croatia will remain head of government. As the electoral commission announced after counting 64.5 percent of the ballot papers, his HDZ party and its allies received 36.1 percent of the vote. This means that Plenkovic would not yet have an absolute majority, but it is possible that he could win over smaller parties and representatives of ethnic minorities to form a coalition. The previous election in 2020 had a similar outcome.
According to projections based on the partial results, the left-liberal opposition alliance Rijeke Pravde (Rivers of Justice), which is close to President Zoran Milanovic and led by the social democratic SDP, came in second with 26.0 percent of the vote. The right-wing nationalist party Domovinski Pokret (Homeland Movement) took third place with 9.7 percent of the vote.
The conservative-right-wing populist alliance led by the Most (Bridge) party with 7.1 percent and the green-liberal Mozemo (We Can) party with 6.6 percent are also likely to make it into parliament again. The hurdle for this is 5 percent.
30 ministers lost due to corruption scandals
Plenkovic has ruled Croatia since 2016, and the HDZ has been in power for 26 of the 33 years since the Adriatic country’s independence. He positions himself as pro-Western and pro-European. Critics accuse him of continuing the expansion of corrupt networks in the state and administration that his predecessors began.
In the almost eight years of his leadership, Plenkovic lost 30 ministers because of corruption scandals. With the recent controversial appointment of senior public prosecutor Ivan Turudic, who is loyal to the HDZ, Plenkovic 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 (EPPO).
High voter turnout and populist rhetoric
Plenkovic’s bitter opponent, President Milanovic, created a better atmosphere in the election campaign. A month before the election, he surprisingly announced that he wanted to become prime minister at the head of an SDP-led government. He based this claim on the corruption allegations against the HDZ.
As president with limited power, he used populist rhetoric to draw closer to the extreme right in Croatia. In contrast to Plenkovic, he attracted attention with pro-Russian statements regarding the Ukraine war.
Voter turnout was now close to a record: just two and a half hours before the polls closed, it was 50.6 percent, higher than the overall turnout in the last election in 2020, which was 46.9 percent.