Election preview: Croatia

Croatia goes to the polls tomorrow for its parliamentary election: it’s again a couple of months early (the last one was in July, the previous one in September), ostensibly to avoid clashing with the European parliament election in June. It’s also, rather oddly, on a Wednesday; recent elections have all been on Sundays, as is common in Europe.

The centre-right Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), under prime minister Andrej Plenković, has been in government since 2016 and is seeking a third term of office. Last time around, helped by incumbency at the time of Covid, it won 37.3% of the vote and 66 of the 151 seats; it reached a majority with the assistance of two small liberal parties, the Liberal Democrats and the Reformists, which had won a seat each, plus the eight MPs from seats reserved for ethnic minorities.

The main opposition party, the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SDP),* won 24.9% and 41 seats. Most of the rest went – and, if the polls are correct, will do so again – to three medium-sized tickets. Homeland, which won 10.9% and 16 seats, is far right, but a relatively moderate example of the species (it is not pro-Russian and supports European Union membership); Bridge (Most), with 7.4% and eight seats, was originally a centrist party but has drifted more to the right; and the Green-Left Coalition, with 7.0% and seven seats, is pretty much what you’d expect.

Those three are currently polling close together around the 10% mark. The HDZ seems to have lost some ground but is still well clear of the SDP, and it looks to be better placed to find additional partners if it needs them. A possible complicating factor is the fact that the president, Zoran Milanović, is not only aligned with the SDP (having been its leader prior to 2016) but last month announced that he was its candidate for prime minister should it win the election.

The constitutional court quickly put paid to that idea, ruling (correctly, in my view) that if Milanović wanted to participate in party politics he first had to resign the presidency. (This is a version of the problem that Charles Michel had earlier in the year at EU level.) He decided to stay put – his term runs until the end of the year – but has been playing an active part in the campaign and clearly has not given up his political ambitions.

Plenković’s government has been plagued by charges of corruption and it’s very likely that a term in opposition would do the HDZ good. But while it still falls short of western standards of governance in a number of respects, Croatia has generally made a success of democracy. It has been particularly fortunate that it secured admission to the EU before expansion became a dirty word in Brussels.

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* I’m using its full name rather than the more colloquial “Social Democrats” because the latter name has been taken by a splitter party that left the SDP in 2021, but it has failed to make an impact. The SDP ran last time with some smaller parties as a ticket called “Restart”; this time it is “Rivers of Justice”.