In just over a month, we will go to the polls for the tenth term of the Croatian Parliament. In a global context, these elections are special as they occur during the coronavirus pandemic. In the local political context, in these thirty years of multi-party system, there has not been a Parliament that is intellectually more modest than the previous, ninth term. Even before we see the final list of parties, groups, and coalitions that will compete for the seats of our representatives in the next term and their final electoral lists, it is clear that in the past thirty years, the choice has not been narrower and more closed than today.
This is a consequence of political engineering that has been applied for three decades, a model of a sort of one-party multi-party system in which it is carefully controlled that no new and no foreign political establishment enters the space of political management where politics is reduced to party mathematics for maintaining power, where it is normal for representatives to walk from party to party, and where electoral programs do not bind anyone.
The deep state does not allow changes
As a result, we have politicians to whom the average entrepreneur would not entrust to guard his company for a week in the summer when he goes for a swim, and politics is perceived as an immoral, contemptible activity. And here lies the trap of the entire model: in Croatia, which has not yet gone through its social and economic post-communist transition, the lives and existences of people literally depend on politics. And these political representatives of ours, to whom you would not entrust a company for short-term custody, at least formally manage seventy percent of the Croatian economy, which is more or less directly connected to the state, to health, judiciary, culture, education, science…
Precisely because politics governs everything here, interest groups or, if you will, the old structures of the deep state that govern politics and produce candidates for the political arena want to convince us that politics is unimportant, that it is not for serious, educated, accomplished people, but only for their political products. If someone dares to contradict and tries to step into that monopoly of power, distributed among different parties, the goal is to ridicule, humiliate, and expel them. So that others do not get the idea. Within the framework of this model, the campaign for the next elections begins. We are bombarded with superficial and less significant calculations to hide the most important things.
Thus, for now, we know that Plenković and HDZ’s advantage over Bernardić and SDP, gained from managing the corona crisis, is melting away. He is trying to compensate for it rhetorically by tapping into the virtual space of Škoro’s Homeland Movement, whatever that space may be. We know that Škoro, for the love of Plenković and a possible future coalition, has severed ties with Most, which had previously been abandoned not only by Plenković but also by Bernardić and many from Most. Because, as they say, it cannot be done with him. It can be done with everyone else. We know that Bernardić’s SDP will enter the elections with a broad left coalition to ensure passage for old allies like Anka Mrak-Taritaš, who no longer has anyone to work with in Parliament. That he will be strengthened on the left wing by former President Ivo Josipović, who brings a revitalized Ustaša snake into the electoral reckoning, while their former boss Milanović regularly stirs up Ustaša-Partisan themes from Pantovčak, and from the far left, united antifas and anarchists arrive with an even bigger snake than Josipović’s. Someone ready for the homeland must still jump in. At least for the sake of drama. To stand in the way of the snake.
