Croatia parliamentary election - November 8, 2015

[Baki]

It's been some time since we've had updates here so I've decided to weigh in.

I should probably start by saying hello to everyone here since this is my first post on the forum.
I have, however, been reading for the last year or so.

Anyway, back to the topic.

As has been said, Bridge (MOST) has formed a partnership with HDZ and its partners to form the 13th Croatian government.
But the road from the election night on November 8th to the actual deal on December 23rd was bumpy and full of twists. For the most part Bridge has been adamant to form a wide left-right coalition SDP-HDZ-Bridge, but the 2 major parties would hear none of it. And realisticly , it couldn't happen.

Then, after rounds and rounds of negotiations, a final meeting has been called. SDP,HDZ and the Bridge attended. People from the Bridge still demanded a wide coalition. If only one side would opose that, they would go with the party that agreed to the wide coalition. If neither coalition agreed , there would have been new election. Presidents of SDP and HDZ , Zoran Milanović and Tomislav Karamarko respectively, allegedly agreed prior to the meeting that neither would sign the agreement to form a wide coalition and that Karamarko would be the first one to walk away from the deal. But when the moment came to do that, Karamarko did not proceed as agreed but insisted that Milanović goes first. That lit Milanović's fuse which is known to be rather short, so , out of the blue, he signed the agreement to form a wide coalition. Karamarko would not and his party walked away. Bridge president Božo Petrov said that HDZ is now out of any combination and that they would under no circumstances reopen the negotiations with them.

Tomorrow, Dec 23rd, SDP and Bridge met to discuss ministers and everything. They agreed on everything and all that was left to do was to gather 76 or more MP signatures and go to the presidents office. That is the official procedure. SDP wanted to do that right away because the president previously said that she would give the parties time until Dec 24 to form a majority. Bridge did not want to do it straight away, they said that they needed more time, although everything was negotiated already.

The whole story appeared over. But no.

Not 2 hours after the meeting with SDP, the Brigde president Božo Petrov came out and said that Bridge is terminating their cooperation with SDP and that they would form a government with HDZ.
The reason they offered for the sudden twist was that allegedly some of the SDP MPs had called some Bridge MPs to persuade them that, in case that the deal went bust, they support a left government.

To this day they haven't revealed who called, who was called nor what was said; with the argument  being protection of the people who were called.

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That is short ( lol, I know) recap of the final 2 days of the negotiation- Dec 23/24.

The government was voted in on January 22nd.

HDZ named 11 ministers, Bridge named 6.

Barely 2 days after the government was voted in, there were 2 scandals.

1) It was discovered that Mijo Crnoja, Veterans minister, lived on an adress that didn't match the adress in all of his documents. The official adress was in fact a piece of bare land that he was given by the country as part of a veteran program. There were 2 problems with that - the official adress falls under a county with smaller taxes so what he actually did is tax dodging. The other problem was that he should not have been given that piece of land in the first place, since he had a house he inherrited. On top of that, he was given a loan by the state, a part of the same program, specifically to build a house on that piece of land. He didn't, but he very confidently said into the camera "I could have gone around the world with that money if I had wanted, it's my money."
Anyway, after a 2 day period of counceling, he was reluctantly relieved of duty.

2) The second scandal was that the Culture minister Zlatko Hasanbegović was discovered to have been an advocat of the Nezavisna država Hrvatska (Independent State of Croatia), a fascist country within Hitlers jursdiction. He is still in position.


All in all, it's been 6 months since the election, but so much has happened that you could do a movie with 2 sequels.


I live in Croatia and am very interested in politics so I will probably occasionaly write something here.

[Baki]

Thank you.

Both ministers are members of HDZ.

[Baki]

Socialdemocrats (SDP) held their party presidential election today. The candidates were:
1) Zoran Milanović - actual president and former prime minister (2011-2016)
2) Zlatko Komadina - governer of Primorsko-goranska županija ( one of 21 croatian districts)

The election was conducted through the "one person-one vote" sistem. The whole party has around 37000 members. Roughly 60% voted which is around what was expected.

Zoran Milanović won 60.1-39.9 .
Apart from his home district, Komadina won only 1 other district.

This is Milanović's 3rd consecutive term as president of SDP. He will turn 50 in October this year.
Interestingly, he is only the second president since the party reformed from the communists into a democratic party.

The party's National Committee and other bodies will be chosen at the national convention in 2 weeks time.


HDZ has their presidential election scheduled for April 17th.
Don't hold your breath ,though, because actual president Tomislav Karamarko is the only candidate.

[Baki]

Croatia is going through the biggest political crisis since the War of Independence in 1990-1991.

So much has happened in the last month or two that I could write for 3 days non-stop and I still couldn't give you the whole story. Events that have preceded this crisis and are relevant for the story date back as much as 10 years.
Therefore, I will probably write a book.

This is what happened yesterday:

The Government has fallen. Croatian president Kolinda Grabar Kitarović held talks with leaders of all major parties yesterday. After that, at a press conference, she declared that nobody was able to present her with 76 signatures. Croatian parliament has 151 MPs , which makes 76 an absolute majority needed to form a government.
The President urged that Head of Parliament Željko Reiner calls for an emergency vote on the decision to dissolve the Parliament.

The parliamentary disscusion will be held on Monday at noon. There is already a majority of 90 MPs that have pledged with their signatures that they will vote in favour of the dissolution.

According to all the relevant information at this moment, the next election will be held on September 4th.

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As for the mentioned poll... don't base your assumptions on it.

The poll is correctly conducted and the pollster has had quite good results regarding election predictions in the past.
But there are still 2 problems with it:

1) The poll was conducted during a huge time frame, more than a month.

2) The bigger problem - most of the mentioned political parties will not make their election stand as an individual party. Croatian election law allows preelection coalitions and major political parties almost always use that. In the November 2015 election HDZ had a coalition od 9 parties, while SDP had a coalition of 6 parties; both big parties included.

SDP and opposition leader Zoran Milanović has said he will form a wide centre-left coalition with which he will try to win a majority in the Parliament. HSS - Croatian peasent party - which were a member of the right coalition in November - have since undergone a leadership change and are widely expected to be a part of the left coalition in the upcoming election.


A general expectation is that SDP and its coalition will win between 65-70 seats, HDZ will win 50-55 seats. MOST will be far from the 19 seats they had in November and Živi zid will profit by that.