November 25, 2003
Elections in Croatia
This blog is mostly about our lives here in Romania, so I don't post much about political stuff. But the elections in Croatia affect some friends of ours, and they're at least indirectly relevant to what goes on here in Romania. So I think a brief comment is in order.
Croatia just held Parliamentary elections, and the big winner was the Croatian Democratic Union ("HDZ"). HDZ is the party that ran Croatia during the 1990s, and it was closely associated with a variety of bad things -- massive corruption, paranoid xenophobic nationalism, the ethnic cleansing of Croatia's Serbs. HDZ was kicked out of office in 2000, and nobody expected it to come back. But it has.
On the positive, or anyway less negative, side, HDZ has been acting like a good boy for the last couple of years. Most of the egregiously corrupt leaders of the 1990s left the party after 2000 (often because it could no longer protect and enrich them). And the new HDZ leader, a Mr. Sanader -- who will probably be Croatia's next Prime Minister -- has said that HDZ has dissociated itself from "any radicalism, extremism, or xenophobia". Mr. Sanader claims that HDZ is now modelled on German and Austrian moderate-conservative parties like the Christian Democrats.
Should we be worried? Well, my impression is that this was in large part a protest vote. Most Croatian voters were sick of the feeble coalition that was elected in 2000; its half-hearted attempts at reform seem to have alienated both conservatives and progressives, without actually accomplishing much on the ground. So I don't think this shows a sudden lurch back towards paranoid nationalism. And nationalist parties aren't bad per se; a bunch of them got elected in Bosnia last year, and it seems to have had surprisingly little effect on the ground.
On the other hand, it's hard to view it as good news for the region. Just the name "HDZ", for most Serbs (and a few Croatians) is as negative as "Nazi". And while the new HDZ has said that it will respect the rights of minorities, and welcomes the return of Serb refugees, it also says that it won't extradite any Croatians to the Hague. Since Croatian courts have not done a great job of convicting Croats accused of ethnic atrocities and war crimes, this is not language calculated to make minorities comfortable,
(If you're really interested in this topic, BTW, you can find a couple of good articles at Transitions Online, which is a consistent source of good information and analysis on the region. Read 'em now, because they'll be restricted to subscribers only after a week.)
The next elections in the region are in Serbia, by the way -- December 28. Nationalists are expected to win big there too. Watch this space.