Croatia Political Briefing: the Beginning of Zoran Milanović's

Home , Davor Ivo Stier, Opposition (Croatia), President of Croatia

ISSN: 2560-1601

Vol. 27, No. 1 (HR)

March 2020

Croatia political briefing: The Beginning of Zoran Milanović’s Presidency and Relationship with Andrej Plenković Valentino Petrović

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The Beginning of Zoran Milanović’s Presidency and Relationship with Andrej Plenković

Summary After Zoran Milanović’s victory over Kolinda Grabar Kitarović in the second round of presidential elections in January this year, the media and public started discussing on his upcoming relationship with current Prime Minister and president of Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), Andrej Plenković. When looking into their resumes, we can notice a lot of similarities, especially with their education and diplomatic background. Today, they are often perceived as rivals and after Milanović had been elected on a presidential duty, Plenković called for a “strong” cohabitation. In this article, we will analyze that very term and provide with overview of Milanović’s first moves as a new president.

Introduction With Zoran Milanović being elected as a new Croatian president in January this year, a lot of questions have been raised regarding his upcoming cooperation with the current Prime Minister, Andrej Plenković. Since his victory on the presidential election, Milanović has expressed quite a few times his willingness and, most of all, his obligation to follow the rules and procedures of presidential duty and he underlined several times that he will not interfere in the work of the other part of the executive branch, that being the Government. That was probably party due to his previous experience as Prime Minister and relationship with then- president Kolinda Grabar Kitarović. During that time, in 2015 and 2016 to be precise, Grabar Kitarović was acting as she was an agent of Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), a party whose member she was prior to being elected as the president. But the Croatian political system understands the president as an independent figure and the person who gets elected has to step out of any party membership after he or she takes the presidential office. Therefore, Milanović probably does not want to begin his term by using the same tactics and approach as Grabar Kitarović who utilized her popularity in 2015 to boost the HDZ’s chances of winning the parliamentary elections. Today, the momentum is on the left side of the political spectrum and it seems that Social Democratic Party (SDP) has the upper hand and could build up their strategy for upcoming parliamentary elections on Milanović’s victory and popularity, but Milanović has already distanced himself from his former party, at least in the first two months of his term. Many analysts are now stressing the dynamics of Milanović and Plenković’s relationship,

1 especially after the latter used the expression “hard cohabitation” to describe their future arrangements.

Diplomatic and Political Background of Milanović and Plenković Looking at biography of both Milanović and Plenković, we could easily notice a high amount of similarities, from their education background, through their years at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and experience in diplomacy, and finally during their time at the very top level of Croatian politics: Milanović as a former president of SDP and a former Prime Minister and Plenković as the current president of HDZ and the current Prime Minister. Both men have graduated law and were one of the best students of their generation. They are also multilingual: Milanović is fluent in English, Russian and French, while Plenković is fluent in English, French, Italian and is also using German. Milanović has joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1993 and was a participant of OSCE peacekeeping mission in Nagorno-Karabakh. From 1996 to 1999 he served as an advisor at the Croatian Mission to the European Union and NATO in Brussels. Plenković, on the other hand, started his diplomatic career in Ministry of Foreign Affairs a year after Milanović, in 1994. From 2002 to 2005, he was a deputy chief of Croatian Mission for the European Union in Brussels. In 2005, he took the position of Deputy Ambassador in France. However, their political career was somewhat different. Milanović joined the SDP in 1999 and was elected as the party’s president in 2007, while Plenković began his political journey much later, in 2011, when he became a member of HDZ. Afterwards, he was a member of the European Parliament before taking charge of HDZ in 2016. Both men are often portrayed in the media as dominant politicians, sometimes even larger than their respective parties, with great communication skills and an appearance that brings confidence to their party members. However, while Plenković has remained loyal to his diplomatic vocabulary, Milanović often steers away from the widely accepted communication approach and tends to be more provocative in his public delivery. Some have even argued that this caused him to lose the parliamentary elections in 2016 when he was using the right-wing discourse in order to get the votes from that part of electorate.

A “Hard” or “Soft” Cohabitation After becoming the new Croatian president in January 2020, Zoran Milanović told the press that he will become the “best friend” to Andrej Plenković in terms of their mutual understanding and policies which require their cooperation, such as foreign affairs and security policy. On the other hand, at the eve of Milanović’s presidential victory, Plenković called for a “hard” cohabitation within the boundaries of the Constitution and seemed as if he is still holding

2 grudges against Milanović because of his comments during their election debate back in 2016. Consequently, many analysts were discussing the so-called cohabitation between the two of them, but strictly speaking cohabitation does not exist because of the parliamentary system in Croatia. Cohabitation can only exist in semi-presidential political system, for example in France, where the Government is directly responsible to the president or parliament and where the president is still a member of the opposition political party and holds a high degree of executive power. As stated earlier, in Croatia, the president has to be politically independent of membership in any of the political parties and, looking better into Croatian Constitution, the president does not have significant power in the executive branch. In this case, we can use cohabitation only as a figure of speech to describe the relationship between the president and the Prime Minister who come from different political parties. But, it seems now that a “hard” cohabitation between Milanović and Plenković is not happening at all. Of course, we need to take into account the fact that Plenković is criticizing and will criticize probably the most of Milanović’s decisions in the upcoming period due to their different party background and rivalry that emerged as both of them are pulling the strings in the executive branch of Government, one being the president and the other Prime Minister. But to evaluate their relationship, we have to look at the bigger picture and political context in Croatia, at the moment. The 2020 is often called the “election” year in Croatia, since we already had the second round of presidential elections in January; in March we have intra-party race in HDZ; while parliamentary elections will take place in autumn. Therefore, political actors are already shaping their agenda and rhetoric in line with the expectations and are looking into any possibilities to gain as much votes as possible. After losing presidential elections, the spirit in HDZ has gone downwards, and there were some individuals who blamed Plenković for the loss, and even announced their candidacy at the intra-party elections. The group led by Miro Kovač, Davor Ivo Stier, and Ivan Penava accused Plenković of turning the party on the left, away from their natural electorate, and even said that he introduced something close to ruling the party as “pharaoh”. Thus, we can argue that Plenković’s relationship with Milanović is largely modeled by the opposition he is facing within his own party. In order to strengthen his position in the intra-party race and to gain votes from the right oriented HDZ’s members, Plenković has decided to use the “hard cohabitation” approach to show publicly that he is willing to roll his sleeves when dealing with the new president of the Republic.

Beginning of Milanović’s Presidential Term The very first move by Milanović has indicated that he will conduct his term unlike any of his predecessors before. He decided that the inauguration ceremony will not take place at the

3 traditional venue when a new president is elected, that being the St. Marko square. Rather, he decided the ceremony is going to happen at the presidential compound on Pantovčak and will only have 39 guests, including the Prime Minister, the former presidents of the Republic, the president of Croatian Parliament, Constitutional Court judges, other high-ranking figures, along with his family. Another move that raised some eyebrows of a considerable amount of right- wing politicians is to remove head sculptures of Croatian historical figures from the compound, but the removal of the first Croatian president Franjo Tuđman’s sculpture is something that was widely criticized among right-wingers. Milanović’s decision on his advisors was also something that has been met with negative response, most of all, his decision to name Jadranka Žarković as his advisor on education. She is the former director of Education and Teacher Training Agency and the rumor is that, during her term, she supported the controversial conference organized by “U ime obitelji” association and that she has sent teachers from Croatian schools to attend it. Another move worth mentioning is the appointment of the new Chief of General Staff of Croatian Armed Forces, Robert Hranj. As a commander-in-chief, the Croatian president appoints a person in that position with the consent of Prime Minister and Minister of Defense. The three men have all agreed on Hranj, but they have not found common grounds when it came to the withdrawal of the Croatian Armed Forces members from Afghanistan. During the presidential campaign, Milanović stressed several times that the Croatian army will withdraw immediately if he becomes the new president. Now, he explains that the army has to follow the schedule and that it will withdraw in a six month period. On foreign policy level, Milanović visited Slovenia and met with his counterpart Borut Pahor. He underlined the friendly relations between Croatia and Slovenia as a foreign policy priority, and called for a partnership between two countries.

Conclusion Not much time has passed since Zoran Milanović swore an oath and became the fifth president of Croatia. Therefore, we will still have to wait for some time to analyze his term more concretely, but it seems that he will fulfill his promise from the campaign when he said that he will not interfere in the work of the Government. At this point, he continues to use the same pattern of behavior he utilized during the campaign, but the political context around him is changing, especially the situation in HDZ. If Plenković remains the president of the largest Croatian party, we can assume that the relationship between the two men will be more moderated than it is now; they will continue to work together in areas where the Constitution requires them to do so, with some occasional criticism here and there.