Grabar-Kitarovic

But the Social Democrat leader quickly turned the tide, navigating the campaign waters to emerge as winner of the first round in December 2019.

Milanovic verbally dominated TV duels with his opponents, outshining the conservative incumbent, Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic.

Centre-left former Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic was sworn in as president of Croatia on Tuesday, six weeks after he defeated incumbent conservative Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic in a run-off election.

"There is no external pressure to encourage change; the [European] Commission, for example, has abolished the anti-corruption reports it once had."

Responsibility for the fight, Ivkovic Novokmet said, had fallen on institutions now firmly in the hands of the conservative Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, in power since January 2016.

A Croatian political expert said Sunday's presidential election victory by the centre-left candidate, Zoran Milanovic, was to some extent a protest vote against his rival's "hard-core nationalist campaign".

Zoran Milanovic won the second round of the presidential election in Croatia on Sunday, according to preliminary results, after nearly 100 per cent of votes were counted.

The Social Democratic candidate and former prime minister took 52.70 per cent of the votes, comfortably beating his centre-right rival, incumbent president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, who won 47.30 per cent.

Croatian political experts said the results of Sunday's first round of presidential elections in were predictable and in line with surveys conducted before the election.

"What happened was what we expected and what I predicted," political analyst Zarko Puhovski told BIRN on Monday.

Preliminary results of Croatia's presidential election on Sunday, after nearly 100 per cent of votes were counted, put Social Democratic candidate and former prime minister Zoran Milanovic in the lead with 29.55 per cent of votes cast.

Croatian citizens on Sunday vote in a presidential election whose outcome is hard to predict, given the strong polling of the top three candidates.

The three leading candidates in Croatia's late-December presidential election have not yet confronted each other directly, for example in TV debates - but are meanwhile quarreling bitterly through the media and social networks on who is the rightful heir to former president Franjo Tudjman - who died 20 years ago on Tuesday.