Croatian President Zoran Milanović spent the last three years of his mandate in a furious style, behaving like a "raging bull". He attacked, did not choose his words, slapped his opponents, drew left and right - more to the right than to the left. Upon his entry into the election arena, the HDZ began to hyperventilate because they immediately realized that he had found them "atomic from the right" - a state of shock set in. Milanović curses Prime Minister Andrej Plenković as a "Brussels poodle" and "a man who is not interested in the interests of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina."
The Croatian president is a great orator, from whom torrents of words - sometimes not quite decent - flow like Niagara. He basically attacked Plenković from the right. For years, he has been calling him a "Brussels poodle", "Brussels cat", "a man who is not interested in the interests of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but only in how he will 'park' in Brussels"; thereby saying that Plenković counted on one of the four leading positions in the European Commission. Milanović is actually the only real Tuđman native and sovereignist at the top of the state.
From boring, predictable elections similar to those in Serbia, the Croatian ones suddenly turned into roulette. By entering the parliamentary race, the President of the Republic, Zoran Milanović, turned Croatia into a political casino in which everything is at stake: the victory of the HDZ and the huge mountain of money and interest that is hidden behind that party, the political and human fate of Plenković and Milanović, and the survival of several parties. If Milanović gets this "va banque" game, Croatia and the regional scene could change significantly.
Before Milanović's entry into the race, polls gave the Croatian Democratic Union some 30 percent of the vote, and the Social Democratic Party only 13. As Croatian citizens do not like to express their preference for the HDZ in public opinion polls (this is still considered dangerous, shameful, suspicious because part of Croats is still firmly convinced that the country is still under the occupation of the Udba), we can believe that that party would get some 35 percent of the votes in the elections, and then with eight minorities led by Pupovec and several renegades from the Homeland Movement and small parties, walked elegantly into the third mandate. Thus, for the first time in Croatia, HDZ would have the government three times in a row.
And then Milanović ran into the field and everything changed. HDZ still has around 30 percent of the vote, but SDP has jumped to 22 percent. With the left we can, they are stronger than the Croatian "party of God". By the way, there are 161 parties in Croatia, but most of them are only on paper or have a small room with a secretary and a ficus in the room. Fewer than ten of them could enter the Parliament - HDZ and SDP, Mozemo, Domovinski pokret, Most, IDS and PGS, and the Independent Platform North of liberal Matija Posavac.
"THE MOMENT OF THE APARTMENT OF TURUDIĆ"
Why did Milanović make this Copernican twist; “a blow of 18 braumeaires”? The turning point was at the press conference of SDP leader Peđa Grbin on March 15. Esdepe's press conference was held outdoors, in front of the Art Nouveau building of the Croatian State Archives, where numerous scenes of Krsto Papić's cult film were filmed. Deliverer. In front of her, Milanović once started a successful campaign to win his first prime ministerial mandate. He walked into Grbin's press unexpectedly, swooping in from the wings, and produced the biggest shock since Sanader's unexpected resignation from the post of prime minister - perhaps even bigger.
"There are moments in the life of each of us when we need to step out of our comfort zone," he said. "At that moment certain Turudić knocked on my door. The time has come to saddle the horses. We will gather a majority for a government of national salvation." In Croatia, machines stopped working, birds miraculously stopped flying, mobile phones became hot, televisions stopped programming - it was real breaking news or "breaking news", as they say now in Croatia.
Andrej Plenković recently appointed Ivan Turudić as state prosecutor and that appointment enraged Milanović and half of Croatia. Namely, Turudić is a friend of Zdravko Mamić, who was legally convicted in Croatia, as well as a number of other suspicious people. He was called out by the media for receiving suits as a gift from one of the defendants of Uskok (Department for Organized Crime); Ivo Sanader called him "our boyfriend" (Hadeze's), which he never hid. In a series of media appearances, as well as the questioning before the Commission for the Selection of Prosecutors, Turudić lied, slandered, messed around, and this matter infuriated Milanović to the extent that he decided to cut everything and form - in big words - the "Government of National Salvation".
Why didn't he leave that job to the opposition? Because it is weak, deflated, idealess and unconvincing. The leaders of the SDP are boring old routines whose ultimate goal is to earn a mandate and sit in the Parliament for two and a half, three thousand euros salary, and the left-wing green movement Mozemo has realized in almost three years of ruling Zagreb that power, especially the executive, is not very easy. job. Last year, they didn't even manage to mow the grass, which Milan Bandić would graze. "There were heavy rains", said Mozemo, "so the vegetation flourished".
The city is too often littered with garbage, the Jakuševac landfill is not closed, the incinerator will probably not be opened even in the next mandate, so "Možemovci" have fallen in the rating. Last year, however, at the peak of their strength, they believed that they would overtake the sluggish SDP and refused to enter into a coalition with them, even though together they would have won more mandates than the HDZ.
RAGED BULL
But now it's too late for them to regret it - the centrist coalition, We can go with some small party, has gathered around the SDP, while two larger formations have gathered on the right - the clerical Most Bože Petrova and the nationalist Homeland Movement of Ivan Penava. Both swear that they won't go with Plenković, but as things stand in the background, Most is flirting with the SDP and the Homeland Movement with the HDZ. Both right-wing parties claim that they will not go with Pupovec or the SDSS. Neither the Homeland Movement nor Most have a problem with the HDZ, steeped in crime, but the fact that it is led by Andrej Plenković, who they perceive as a South-Communist worm in the Croatian apple. If Plenković left, everything would change.
Zoran Milanović spent the last three years of his mandate in a furious style, behaving like a "raging bull". He attacked, did not choose his words, slapped his opponents, drew left and right - more to the right than to the left. The Croatian president is a great orator, from whom torrents of words - sometimes not quite decent - flow like Niagara. He basically attacked Plenković from the right. For years, he has been calling him a "Brussels poodle", "Brussels cat", "a man who is not interested in the interests of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but only in how he will 'park' in Brussels"; thereby saying that Plenković counted on one of the four leading positions in the European Commission.
Milanović is actually the only real Tuđman native and sovereignist at the top of the state. Upon his entry into the electoral arena, the HDZ began to hyperventilate because they immediately realized that he had found them "atomically from the right" - a state of shock set in, so the Constitutional Court (another branch of the HDZ led by the godfather of Vladimir Šeksa Miroslav Šeparović). Logically, he said that it was impossible for the president of the republic to appear on the electoral list for the parliament, threatening to cancel the electoral list, and perhaps even the elections as a whole, if Milanović appeared on them as a candidate.
This did not worry Milanović - "What can I do", he said. "The so-called warning of the Constitutional Court in my emotional and political world has the character of this beech tree. If they dare to cancel the elections, it is a coup d'état. Coup d'état!"
The Constitutional Court has banned running on the list, but he will not be on the list; the position of "candidate for prime minister" does not exist in Croatia except colloquially, so Milanović did not act unconstitutionally there either. In the campaign, he will appear as the "ghost of Hamlet's father", an immobile driver who constantly hovers somewhere above the heads and decisively influences the rhythm of the drama. Milanović is and is not in the campaign; he is more visible than all of them, but he is not on the lists, and he did not resign from the position of president, because in that case he would have been succeeded in Pantovčak by some Hadeze native as an acting officer, so - in the event of a tie in the election - that Hadeze's "ve-de" would have been assigned the mandate , and Milanović wants to avoid that every now and then. Kolinda Grabar Kitarović already robbed him of his mandate once when Most turned towards Tomislav Karamarko's HDZ, and pushed Croatia so far to the right that it has not returned to its former rut to this day.
If Milanović had resigned, he would have impressed the nation, but he would have left the entire country at the mercy of the HDZ, and he did not want that, so he faced accusations of being calculating.
In politics, they say, everything is about timing. It seems that Milanović may have crowed too soon. The positive shock on the center and the left, the "galvanization" caused by his appearance, has deflated significantly (according to polls) in just seven days. They began to question the achievements of his first term as prime minister, to discover holes in the idea, to notice controversies, and there are quite a few of them. Milanović is not on the gas as a peace mediator, he is often in conflicts, and in the case of the victory of the "Rijeka Pravde" coalition (that's how the SDP coalition was called, according to the hit of Film and Jure Stublić) and the formation of a majority for the "Third Republic" this feature will be necessary, because it will probably mean the gathering of the center-left, center and right - that is, the SDP and its partners, the right-wing clerical Most, minorities, small parties, and support may also be needed of the left-green movement We can, which is best described as "horns in a bag". Even the late Mahatma Gandhi would have a hard time reconciling it, let alone the grumpy Milanović. However, he swears that he will miraculously transform and says "my mother..." Perhaps he would have done better if he had run for office ten days later and resigned - then the double blow would have been more lethal and in a shorter time - HDZ would not have had time to turn around. .
CROATIA THREE P
This is how HDZ recovered from the initial shock, they are still doing well in the polls, but they have a big problem. This is the "coalition potential" - nobody will deal with them, both the left and the right - for now - treat them as infected. In two mandates, Andrej Plenković executed the entire army of ministers and vice-presidents, as many as 30 of them ("So what", he says, "Macron got away with almost a hundred of them"). Most of them were involved in corruption scandals, many have been arrested or are yet to be arrested. The European prosecutor, "scrap collector" Laura Koveši, dangerously towered over Plenković's main collaborator, the Minister of Culture Nina Obuljen Koržinek, and there are many former ministers in court. In Plenković's second mandate, HDZ, in short, experienced one of those anticlimaxes when everyone was disgusted, so the citizens went to the polls and voted for the opposition. This time it didn't have to be like that - and maybe it won't be - because that opposition is truly miserable, more miserable than ever, and without Milanović's "pushing" it had absolutely no chance.
Now the turnout will be the judge. HDZ has several hundreds of thousands of clients - people who have been employed up and down the country, those whose work, business or career depends on HDZ. With a low turnout, they make up a sufficient majority, but this figure is still limited, so in the event of a high turnout, a mass of anti-Hadesians will appear at the polling stations. Andrej Plenković would have to get more than 60 (out of 151) seats in the Parliament in order to, through the ultimate effort of trade, somehow form a government.
In Croatia, that work is done by "tokens", as the blessed mayor of Zagreb, Milan Bandić, called them, in Serbian it is called "flyers". The last time, Plenković won 66 mandates, so immediately on the night of the announcement of the results, it was clear that he would have a majority with Pupovec (who called him "dry gold"), and not with Škora. He can still count on eight minorities, and for the rest he will have to negotiate heavily with the Homeland Movement or at least half of that party led by Ivan Penava - but can Penava and Pupovac work together? They hypothetically already call that majority "the government of the three P's - Plenković, Penava, Pupovac". No matter how it sounds, that "wonderful platypus" on Markov trg is not unimaginable. The second majority, namely, could hardly be more compact - the SDP with its partners, along with Most and Milanović, will also be composed according to the formula "left to right nowhere in my apartment".
If Plenković is in a position to form a government, we will have a policy of continuity - perhaps a slightly more right-wing government than today's, but with strong Orbanist tendencies. Milanović remains president, but it is questionable whether he will go to the new presidential elections with the aura of a loser, which must be held by the end of the year.
If Milanović wins with "Rijeka Pravde" and "Third Republic", we will have, by all accounts, a short-lived experiment. Croatia faces the dismissal of Ivan Turudić even before he becomes state prosecutor, great turbulence in the HDZ, the almost certain dismissal of Andrej Plenković, a new deal of cards in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Milanović is an ally of Milorad Dodik and an opponent of Željko Komšić), and we should not forget the fact that Milanović is not an advocate of Ukraine. He is not Viktor Orbán, nor is he Robert Fico, but he is closer to that club than to the NATO hawks.
A draw is possible, perhaps even probable - such an outcome after which no one will be able to form a new Croatian government. In that case, new elections await us. You should count on that.
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