SDP Leader's Tirades Leave Croats Bemused

Zoran Milanovic, Croatia's former Prime Minister and president of the centre-left Social Democratic Party, SDP, is using harsh language in the election campaign to win over centrist voters, experts agree.

"Surveys show the People's Coalition and Milanovic will win between 60 and 65 seats [out of 151] and Milanovic is aware that this won't be enough to form a government, so he tries - in my opinion wrongly - to win one more part of the voters in the centre, in a way by 'taking off all the breaks'," Berto Salaj, professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Zagreb, told BIRN.

With parliamentary elections due on September 11, the leader of the centre-left People's Coalition is trying to provoke a personal conflict with Andrej Plenkovic, the new president of the centre-right Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, they say.

"Milanovic thinks a personalised campaign will benefit him the most," Salaj said.

In a leaked audio of Milanovic's meeting with Croatian war veterans last week, besides calling Bosnia a failed state and accusing Serbia of "arrogance", Milanovic said that his mother "was not a military doctor [using the Serbian term 'lekar'] like Plenkovic's", suggesting that Plenkovic's family was loyal to former Yugoslavia.

"As a Christian I can forgive him, but I won't forget. Never will it come to my mind to even think of saying something like that about anybody's family," Plenkovic replied on Sunday.

"I never publicly mentioned anyone's parents, not even now ... I have thought about this and don't know what's insulting in it [statement], it's a fact," Milanovic responded later.

"I don't run from the fact about who my father worked for and have no problem in talking about it," he added, accusing Plenkovic of portraying...