Zoran Milanović has confirmed that he is definitely not a president – a ficus. The election results are certainly not what he hoped for, but his aggressive campaign on the edge or even beyond the edge of constitutionality has paved the way for changes at the top of the Croatian political arena.
HDZ is once again the relative winner of the elections, but the famous statement by Andrej Plenković ‘I can do whatever I want’ no longer holds. In forming the ruling majority, and then in assembling the government, another of Plenković’s messages could prove relevant: ‘A party cannot be a hostage to one person’.
The reason is not only the weaker results of HDZ compared to previous elections but also the structure of those results. Here, I primarily mean the excellent result of Ivan Anušić, who is actually the biggest HDZ winner in the elections – both in terms of party results in his electoral unit and personal preferential votes. Anušić could play a key role in forming the ruling majority, which would be based on a coalition of HDZ and the Homeland Movement, which is the most politically logical combination. But it is also a combination that Andrej Plenković would certainly like to avoid.
The second change prompted by Milanović is bringing the collapse of SDP to the point where as a party they must decide: either they will find their recognizable political content with some new leadership, or they will cede their place as the leading party on the left to the Možemo! party in the next elections. Unlike SDP, Možemo! has both a program and a strategy and systematically implements it.
The third possible change is the formation of a government in which the main coalition partner of HDZ would for the first time be a party politically to the right of it, namely DP. However, the shift of the electorate to the right is currently a European trend, while centrist options, which former German Chancellor Angela Merkel practiced as a magical formula for gaining power and supported in others, are now on a downward trajectory.
The fourth change contributed by Milanović’s ‘Rivers of Justice’ is the cleansing of the parliamentary party arena, i.e., the disappearance of a number of politically insignificant and powerless parties – whether their leadership ‘drowned’ in the ‘Rivers of Justice’ (Dalija Orešković, Anka Mrak-Taritaš, Krešo Beljak, Marijana Puljak…), or they did not cross the electoral threshold, such as the substantively unrecognizable Croatian Social Democrats, Karolina Vidović-Krišto, Katarina Peović, various sovereignists, and various right-wingers).
Political Awakening of Citizens
But perhaps the most valuable change prompted by Milanović’s pre-election tornado is the political awakening of citizens, which was reflected not only in the very high voter turnout but also in how and for whom they voted. One of the interesting indicators of voter will is the preferential votes.
Here, another major electoral winner on the HDZ list was Davor Ivo Stier, who won a mandate with preferential votes in the sixth electoral unit, practically without any personal campaign, at a time when Andrej Plenković prepared the ground for his political euthanasia by placing him in an electoral unit that is not his, in a position that was initially non-viable, in a position to enter the Parliament as a reserve if those ahead of him become ministers. Stier’s preferential vote is all the more significant when we recall that about ten years ago he tried to win the party’s top position by making the fight against political clientelism one of the party’s priorities.
Another interesting case of winning a parliamentary mandate with preferential votes is DP’s Stijepo Bartulica, who has politically profiled himself as a convinced conservative of the Western type, exceptionally educated in foreign policy, and to whom the party leadership (Radić, Penava) assigned a non-viable position in the second electoral unit, probably thinking that Bartulica is ‘too complicated’ and ‘too heavy’ for Croatian voters. However, it turned out that Western conservatism has its voter base in Croatia, more than in the leadership of political parties.
But whether the door to changes in the internal structure of the Croatian political scene, which Zoran Milanović has ajar with his foot, will remain open or quickly close by preserving the status quo will be seen in the next week or two, through the process of forming a parliamentary majority and government.
