Croatian Democratic Union

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.

Croatia's ruling party will host Europe's largest political bloc, the centre-right European People's Party, EPP, on Wednesday and Thursday in Zagreb, a major publicity event for Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic but one that has already caused some controversy.

Amid an ongoing crisis in the ruling coalition in Croatia, with the junior coalition partner, the Croatian People's Party, HNS, threatening the senior Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, that it will vote against the draft budget for 2020, speculation grows about about the coalition collapsing.

Why has the ruling Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, that has run the country for 20 of these 28 years, waited so long to promote Vukovar Remembrance Day, a de-facto date of national suffering, to a national holiday?

Consider the borderline authoritarianism that has ensconced itself in EU member states like Poland and Hungary; or the alarming gains made by the far right in such "established" European democracies as Austria, Germany, and Italy; or the brutal border regime that the EU maintains along its Mediterranean frontier - a border regime, we should recall, that at the current rate will likely result in

The deadline agreed between the leaders of thre three main parties in Bosnia on forming a state-level government - the Party of Democratic Action, SDA, the Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, and the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, SNSD - expired on Thursday.

"These are individuals, perhaps organised, but they are not the fruit of some climate in society, they are deviations that need to be dealt with based on individual responsibility," Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said on Wednesday.

Plenkovic added that the government "won't be sucked into a spiral of hate".

This situation is even more remarkable given even a cursory glance at global aluminum prices. While aluminum prices have not fully recovered from their peak just before the 2008 financial crisis, they have returned to their price point in the early 2000s - which is higher than what the metal was trading for during most of the 1980s and 1990s.

Uncertainty

Few European countries have seen the same levels of combined economic and political turmoil as Greece over the last decade. Thankfully, Greece seems to be coming out of the turbulent years, but as it does so, will its economy be able to accelerate forward or remain stuck in limbo?