In Electing a Leftist Mayor, Croatia Follows European Trends

While Croatia's ruling centre-right conservatives can console themselves with respectable results outside the capital in the local elections, the May 16 first round in the local elections brought no such comfort to Croatia's traditional left-wing standard bearers, the Social Democrats, SDP. In left-leaning Zagreb, they did even worse than the conservatives.

"Croatia has reached the stage in … development where urban hipsters overtake the former communist as the main political movement on the left," a London-based Croat writer and analyst, Luka Ivan Jukic, mulled.

As that tweet said, Croatia's local election results suggest that the country's politics increasingly correspond to a trend making itself felt up and down Europe. While centre-right and right-wing forces are holding their own nationally, and even tapping into new votes - the left in Europe is strengthening its grip in big cities but also breaking apart - as green, radical alternatives contest and overtake older, established social democratic parties.

Annalena Baerbock, party chairwoman and Chancellor candidate of the Green Party (Buendnis 90 / Die Gruenen) gives a press statement at the Heinrich-Boell-Stiftung in Berlinm Germany, 17 May 2021. Photo: EPA-EFE/Andreas Gora / POOL Pool Photo

Besides Croatia, Germany is a telling case of this; a poll taken three ago, months before September's elections, showed the Greens for the first time in the lead nationally with 28 per cent of the vote.

What is equally interesting about the poll is that while the Greens are just inches ahead of Angela Merkel's governing conservatives, they are miles ahead of the long established Social Democrats, now trailing on 13 per cent.

Unless something changes, if the right loses the...

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