Prime Ministers of Croatia

Then a parliamentary session will be convened to confirm the election of new ministers.

The former manager of the Croatian national football team, Miroslav Ciro Blazevic, has surprised and shocked many in Croatia by appearing in a video made for the European elections by the Independent Democratic Serbian Party, SDSS, a party representing Croatia's Serbian minority.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the top candidate of the centrist European People's Party, EPP, for the post of European Commission President, Manfred Weber, will participate in the central election conference of the ruling Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, on Saturday in Zagreb.

Plenkovic has developed a strategy of silence on many of the scandals that have embroiled his own ministers and party colleagues, to good effect, Mamic said.

"If you look at his position, this is effective and efficient communication," she said. "He gives short answers, because obviously the outcome of all these cases could go in any direction."

A host of parties on the right and left of Croatia's political spectrum are using European Parliament elections in May as a way to gain exposure.

The Adriatic city of Dubrovnik, Croatia's best-known tourist destination, on Thursday and Friday will host the 16 + 1 summit, a Chinese initiative to strengthen business ties between China and 16 countries from Central and Eastern Europe.

The 19th anniversary of the death of Croatia's first President, Franjo Tudjman, was marked on Monday by the unveiling of a more than four-metre-high monument in Zagreb, near the National University Library and the Vatroslav Lisinski concert hall.

On his first visit to Croatia in several years, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he and Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic had agreed on the need to resolve the thorny dispute over ownership of the Croatian energy company INA.

"I came to change this unnatural situation and return our relations to the normal track," Orban told the press conference on Monday.

The judge reading the verdict convicting former premier Ivo Sanader of war profiteering said a mitigating factor was his wartime service - but ex-members of his unit alleged he only served for a day.

Zagreb County Court on Monday convicted former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader of war profiteering for accepting an unlawful payment of 3.6 million kunas (around 485,000 euros) during talks between Austria's Hypo Bank and the Croatian government.

The talks took place during the war, between late 1994 and March 1995, when Sanader was Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.