Local elections (3)

Sunday is the second and decisive round of the local elections. In Zagreb, Osijek, Velika Gorica, Split and Dubrovnik (and some smaller towns) voters will decide which candidate they like best. The campaigns have been dirty and election rules have been violated. People who abstained from voting in Dubrovnik's first round received a letter from the HDZ party to support HDZ candidate Dubravka Šuica in the second round. How does HDZ know who voted and who did not? Aren't those lists supposed to be secret?
In a move to boost her popularity incumbent Dubrovnik mayor Šuica had "Parking pass holders only" signs removed, copying Zagreb's mayor Milan Bandić. I think one should have much disdain for voters to think that such cheap moves attract them, but in the Croatian take-and-give political culture this might work.
Milan Bandić sent me a nice postcard yesterday. It is a copy of the photo above, showing Bandić and his "achievements". It says "Citizens know", meaning that they know that Bandić built a brigde, an apartment block, a roundabout, laid out a public park, and so on. Truly impressive. But I was really amazed to see the Museum of Contemporary Art on the postcard. Zagreb is probably the only European capital without a functioning Museum of Contemporary Art. Since time immemorial the old museum is closed, pending the opening of the new museum in Novi Zagreb. When that new museum will be opened - no one knows, not even Bandić.
If a man like Berlusconi can be reelected in Italy, I don't see why Bandić wouldn't win the second round in Zagreb. I would just recommend Bandić to speak standard Croatian, and a bit slower please. You are completely incomprehensible to people who learned Croatian as a second language.

Local elections (2)

Croats cast their vote in local elections yesterday. A summary of the results, ordered by the size of towns.
In Zagreb incumbent mayor and swanky social democrat Milan Bandić goes to the next round, in which he will have to fight independent candidate Josip Kregar, dean of Zagreb's Law faculty. Bandić received 48 percent of the votes, a bit short for a win in the first round.
Entrepeneur Željko Kerum got 40 percent of the votes in Split. His main contender Ranko Ostojić (social democrat) follows with 35 percent. Both men (Croatian politics is to a large degree, unfortunately, men's business) will have a face-off in the second round.
No second round in Rijeka, Croatia's largest port. Social democrat Vojko Obersnel won a safe majority of the votes.
Osijek will have a second round in two weeks. The contenders are incumbent right-wing mayor Anto Đapić and Krešimir Bubalo, member of Branimir Glavaš HDSSB party. Glavaš was sentenced to ten years last week after he was found guilty of war crimes against Serbian civilians in Osijek.
All other towns have much less than 100.000 inhabitants. Only in these smaller towns some HDZ mayors managed to secure their seats (HDZ is the ruling party in national politics). HDZ president Jadranka Kosor said that her party won the vast majority of the counties, for what it's worth. Croatia has 21 counties (županije), an administrative unit that does not hold a lot of power.
High-ranking HDZ-member Andrija Hebrang, former minister of Defense and Health, was not surprised that his party did not win in the bigger towns. "In the centre of the city live either the voters or descendants of people who were privileged during communism." The electorate Hebrang likes better gathered last week in Bleiburg for a commemoration. In 1945 Tito's partisans killed there a great number of fascists, ustaše, četniks and also some innocent people. Hebrang gave a speech in Bleiburg, a bunch of clergymen said that if "Bleiburg is no genocide, then what is genocide?", and several people were arrested for wearing fascist symbols.

Spoiled students on strike

The social democrats try to warm the electorate for the upcoming local elections with manekenke or models (I wonder how many Croats know of the Dutch origin of this word - photo Jutarnji list). Political and educational temperatures ran high already. The economic recession and budgetary problems forced the Croatian government to cut the salaries of a public sector workers.
Public sector workers aren't happy with that and will start a strike on 13 May that should culminate in a big demonstration on the 16th, pre-election day. I am not sure whether the great number of workers that are, almost as a habit, on sick leave will join in, but striking nurses, professors, teachers and others who work in Croatia's monstrously big public sector should cause serious problems for ordinary citizens.
The expected strike of university staff will not have too great consequences as many students are on strike themselves for almost three weeks now. It is an almost nation-wide strike (Pula, Rijeka, Split) but the center is, of course, Zagreb. The core of the striking students study at the Faculty of Philosophy. Other than its name suggests, this faculty is the largest and most important faculty in the country and is a true monolith. You can study there everything from art history, Japanology, Turkish, psychology, sociology, linguistics to literature and archeology. There is so much to choose that 2 out of 3 students never make up their mind and leave higher eduction without finishing their studies. The rest, 1 out of 3, finishes on average after seven years.
An intolerable situation, you would say. But then you haven't met Croatian students yet. Instead of protesting against the chronic shortage of study materials, books, electronic journals and likewise, they protest against paying a small tuition fee and demand free education instead. With pathetic slogans like "Znanje nije roba" (Knowledge is not a commodity) and "Jedan svijet, jedna borba" (One world, one struggle) they try to shift the financial burden of their protracted studies to the rest of the Croatian population, which is not particularly wealthy. One should know that students pay only 16 euro per month for a room in a dorm (2 students per room), 70 cents for a dinner in the student restaurant (including a drink) and nothing for public transportation. Cinemas, theaters, museums and anything that is remotely connected to a student's life are available at reduced prices. Minister of Education Dragan Primorac offered free eduction for all students who successfully get a degree, but the students didn't go along. Everything should be "free" for "everybody".
There is no such a thing as a free lunch, said Milton Friedman, but as the students also protest against capitalism, privatization and liberalism, anything that makes economic sense will fall on deaf ears. Croatia, by the way, has preciously little of either capitalism, privatization or liberalism.

War crimes and a war of words

Branimir Glavaš, a right wing politician and former general, has been sentenced to ten years in jail for committing war crimes against Serbian civilians in 1991 in his home town Osijek. As a member of parliament, Glavaš still enjoys parliamentary immunity, so he could not be arrested and brought to jail. It is expected that the Croatian parliament will lift Glavaš immunity today, but the convict decided not to wait for that moment. He fled to Bosnia, his second homeland of which he is a national too.
The sentencing of Glavaš (image source) came a week before the local elections. Glavaš enjoys some measure of popularity and the ruling HDZ party is afraid that his sympathizers will turn their anger about the conviction of their war hero against the HDZ. Prime minister Ivo Sanadar therefore said that the Supreme Court joined the election campaign. The president of the court reacted by saying that Sanader has crossed the line between politics and judiciary, a line he is not allowed to cross.
Branimir Glavaš has launched, from Bosnia, his own campaign against Sanadar. He called him a "monster that gave away everything we fought for". Glavaš's supporters in Bosnia burned HDZ flags. How popular the HDZ is in Bosnia, is quite relevant for politics in Croatia. Croats in Bosnia constitute a distinct electoral constituency, and they have voted massively for HDZ so far.
Glavaš's own party, the Croatian Democratic Assembly of Slavonia and Baranja (HDSSB) is strong in Osijek, but no national factor. HDSSB president Vladimir Šišljagić, a former officer in the Jugoslav National Army, announced a "war of exhaustion" against Ivo Sanadar. Another high ranking HDSSB mocked Sanader's business activities in Austria (from 1987 to 1991) while Croatia was at war: "I would recommend Sanader not to speak about war veterans, because he was filming porno movies in Austria while we were defending Croatia."
The political war is far from over. On 17 May, when local elections are being held, the first battle will take place.

Local elections

On 17 May Croats will go to the polls in local elections. To inform myself, I checked the main newspaper websites and TV stations. Surprisingly, it is Nova TV's website (a commercial station) that offers the most extensive information on the local elections. Their news program, Dnevnik, is usually rather sensational and focuses almost exclusively on Croatian affairs, in which respect it resembles Croatian newspapers. None of the newspapers nor state run public television HRT has a site about the elections.
In Osijek, Croatia's fourth largest city, the main candidates competing for the position of mayor belong to the right or extreme right. Krešimir Bubalo is leading the polls. Bubalo is a member of the HDSSB party, led by Branimir Glavaš who is charged with war crimes. His main opponent is Anto Đapić, who belongs to the HSP, a party known for its strong anti-Serb attitude.
Another interesting city to watch is Split, Croatia's second by size. In Split entrepreneur and independent candidate Željko Kerum is leading the polls. In national elections Split was firmly controlled by the governing HDZ party of prime minister Sanader, himself a son of Split and great fan of football club Hajduk. Kerum's political independence is part of a wider trend in Croatia towards non-aligned candidates for political posts.
Then, of course, there are the usual outsiders and irregularities. In Kaštela, a small town not far from Split, former porn star Lidija Šunjerga runs for the office of mayor. Her campaign is centered around gender equality and environmental protection. More worrying are reports about manipulation of the number of registered voters. Dusina, a tiny village in the Dalmatian hinterland, counts a total of 530 voters of which 404 are registered at the same address. You would need a skyscraper of 35 stories to accommodate so many voters at one and the same address, the paper Novi list calculated. In Zadar, 19 voters are registered at the address of a two-story house.
The political blog Pollitika launched a site where you can check how many voters are registered at a certain address. By looking up addresses and seeing the number of registered voters, Pollitika wants to map (literary) irregularities. This evening a television program on Nova TV will be dedicated to electoral manipulation, so Pollitika's map should get more details.