Croatia

Green-Left Trend?

Croatian leader of 'Mozemo' Party Tomislav Tomasevic casts his ballot at a polling station in downtown Zagreb, Croatia. Photo: EPA-EFE/ANTONIO BAT

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.

While the Right may claim victory in Sunday's local elections in Croatia, the capital is tilting to the Left.

A controversial annual mass gathering of Croats at Loibacher Feld near the Austrian town of Bleiburg, which has been accused of nurturing nationalist sentiments, is not expected to take place this weekend, Austrian police said on Thursday, after the event was also cancelled in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Croatian President Zoran Milanovic drew condemnation on Thursday after he insulted reporters from the public broadcaster Croatian Radio Television, HRT, in the coastal city of Split, accusing them of being tricksters, mercenaries and an embarrassment to the country.

A survey of Croatian high school pupils showed that less than a third of the participants consider Croatia's World War II Nazi-allied state a fascist state and over half were either undecided or unwilling to give their opinion.

Brdo pri Kranju – Slovenian Foreign Minister Anže Logar and his Italian and Croatian counterparts, Luigi di Maio and Gordan Grlić Radman, signed in Brdo pri Kranju on Wednesday a joint statement on trilateral cooperation in the northern Adriatic. The document is the foundation for strengthening cooperation in areas that are key for all three countries, Logar said.

At least 924 lawsuits against the media and journalists are active in Croatia, in which plaintiffs are demanding almost 78.5 million kunas in total, or some 10 million euros, which marks an increase in the number of lawsuits compared to last year, when the number was 905, the latest annual survey done by the Croatian Journalists' Association, HND, reveals.

President Zoran Milanovic said on Tuesday that he spoke with representatives of Croatian war veterans' associations and agreed with them that the fate of Croatian soldiers and civilians who went missing during the 1990s war for independence from Yugoslavia must finally be established.

After a two-and-a-half-year-old girl who was badly beaten by her mother died in a Zagreb hospital on Sunday, the government has admitted that there are problems with Croatia's social care system and promised to work on improvements.