ISSN: 2560-1601

Vol. 36, No. 1 (HR)

January 2021

Croatia political briefing: A Preview of 2021 Key Political Events in Croatia Valentino Petrović

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A Preview of 2021 Key Political Events in Croatia

Summary

It is always a difficult task when someone is trying to predict the events in the upcoming year given the lack of information and ever-changing political environment. The year 2020 brought us COVID-19 and a couple of earthquakes with serious damage in Zagreb and Sisak- Moslavina County. Thus, almost everything that happened in political sphere was heavily influenced by the health emergency and natural catastrophe. With this in mind, one has to be very careful when making political forecast, however, there are a few processes that we have decided to include in this analysis based on their nation-wide political importance.

Introduction

After everyone in Croatia hoped that a disastrous 2020 is finally over, on 29th December another earthquake of 6.4 magnitude struck Sisak-Moslavina County and was felt throughout Croatia, even in some other neighboring countries such as Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. The earthquake caused a widespread infrastructural damage, with the town of Petrinja being severely affected in addition to number of nearby towns and villages. Unfortunately, seven people were confirmed dead and many others were injured. The political context of the year 2021 will therefore be heavily dictated by the speed of the reconstruction process as well as the process of acquiring the financial aid to support all the families left without rooftops. It is expected that everyone involved will showcase a high level of coordination whether from the offices of decision-makers or from the very streets of damaged areas.

However, at the moment of writing, it appears that the confusion is still overabundant, hopefully, not for a long time. Except for the political consequences of this year’s both earthquakes and COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 will bring us another election race, this time for local and regional offices, with much of publicity already being shifted towards the future of Zagreb’s mayor, Milan Bandić. The elections will also serve as a test point for both major political parties as well as other political actors who were quite successful in 2020 July parliamentary elections. Finally, some analysts have underlined the importance of 2021 census,

1 which will demonstrate demographic characteristics and trends of Croatian population in the last ten years.

The 2020 Sisak-Moslavina County Earthquake

After witnessing both earthquakes in a time span of only nine months, a usual phrase has become that Croatian people will always display a highest level of empathy, national unity and humanitarian assistance in times of health emergency or natural catastrophe such as this one. This has proven to be true, but cynics would argue that such sentiments or even the most rudimentary inter-personal understandings should be among us at all time, not only in crisis situation. However, these times require much more than empathy and mutual understanding; it is prevalent that all emergency services and crews are well coordinated by the token of clear and visible vertical chain of command. This, unfortunately, was not the case until a week after the earthquake when President Zoran Milanović gave an interview in which he spoke of the much-needed field coordination and called for the declaration of catastrophe in order to make sure who will call the shots and how money will be distributed to endangered cities, towns and other affected areas.

Only a day later Prime Minister made a decision to establish a special branch of the Civil Protection Directorate which will be designated to mitigate the earthquake consequences. The organization will be supervised by the Deputy Prime Minister, Tomo Medved, with the assistance of other Deputy Prime Minister, Boris Milošević, and the Minister of Construction, Physical Planning and State Property, Darko Horvat. It has yet to be seen how the process of reconstruction will unfold and what would be the true colors of it, taking into account the fact that such projects can often be subject of corruption and conflict of interest as it was the case during the post-War nineties. Unfortunately, communication is still not a notable trait when it comes to field coordination since mayor of Petrinja, Darinko Dumbović, recently complained that he was not invited to participate in a meeting of the above-mentioned Directorate.

The Local Elections

Apart from day-to-day political intrigues, one of the 2021 major political outings will be the May/June local elections. After securing another mandate as a president of Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and a comfortable win in last year’s parliamentary elections, Andrej Plenković will have an opportunity to further strengthen his party’s organization even though

2 it is still not clear who will run against Milan Bandić for a mayor of Zagreb. Nevertheless, it could be interesting to take a peek at the previous results of local elections in Croatia with regards to the aggregate number of votes that two main parties (HDZ and Social Democratic Party (SDP)), won in the Zagreb City Assembly and in county assemblies. According to analysis by Marijana Grbeša and Berto Šalaj, both from Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb, in 2017 local elections HDZ won 536 000 votes (32%), while SDP won 380 000 (23%). If we look at 2013 local elections, it is clear that SDP’s support is declining due to the fact that it previously won 450 000 of votes, while HDZ is on the rise with 502 000 votes in 2013. The authors indicate that HDZ position on local level is even more superior taking into account that it won 12 county governors and 60 mayors in 2017 elections. SDP, on the other hand, won only 2 county governors and 22 mayors.

There was a lot of discussion on who will be SDP’s candidate in Zagreb and for some time the media speculation was that the major center-left party will support the leader of green- left platform We Can! (Možemo!), Tomislav Tomašević, to run against Milan Bandić. The leaders of both Možemo! and SDP refused to give comments on this issue, however it was clear that negotiations were in progress. According to opinion polls commissioned by these very parties, Tomislav Tomašević was the one who had the best opportunity to beat Bandić with 30% of votes against 15%. Eventually, the deal was not reached and SDP will have to find its own candidate in the capital, while Možemo! can keep its hands clean by not going into a coalition with SDP which was one of the primary reasons why it managed to produce a fine result on 2020 parliamentary elections. The local elections will be the first real test for SDP under a new leadership and also the possibility for the newly-elected president Peđa Grbin to see on which people he can count on as well.

The 2021 Census

The year 2021 will mark the first nation-wide census since 2011 and it will surely provoke further political debates. Lidija Brković from the Croatian Bureau of Statistics has highlighted that citizens will have an opportunity to register themselves online which will modernize the whole process by improving the efficiency of the data processing. The logic behind this was to improve the accuracy and quality of the census by not allowing any kind of data manipulation. Ivan Penava, a former member of HDZ, a mayor of Vukovar, and the president of Local and Regional Self-government parliamentary Committee, already warned that 2011 census was highly manipulated by interest groups and politics. He further argued against the intention to

3 include the national minority members as census takers/officers and said there is no reason why somebody would ask the census taker about his nationality. He supported his thesis on data manipulation with the example from Vukovar. According to 2011 census, Vukovar had 28 000 citizens, while the city administration registered 22 000 citizens. However, it is assumed that citizens would be more open and candid if the census taker would share their nationality. Of course, the census and everything that was discussed in previous paragraphs will be heavily influenced by the COVID-19 situation and circumstances around it. Therefore, it is wise to wait a little bit longer before making any kind of predictions for 2021.

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