Kroatien: Den Präsidenten wählen

Präsident Mesic hat in der zweiten Runde der
Präsidentschaftswahl gegen den stellvertretenden Premier Kosor
gewonnen. Der Wahlkampf sei farbenfroh, sein Ausgang
jedoch vorhersehbar gewesen, so Tena
Erceg in Transitions Online.

The fourth presidential election since Croatia declared
independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 ended, as expected, with the
victory of incumbent Stipe Mesic. Even though Mesic had failed to
win in a first round on STIPE MESIC 2 January, he secured 66
percent in a runoff on 16 January. His challenger, Jadranka Kosor,
got 34 percent. Kosor is deputy prime minister in the government of
Ivo Sanader and a leading member of the conservative Croatian
Democratic Union (HDZ), to which Mesic belonged in the early
1990s. 

Many political analysts agree that the results reflect a
reluctance by voters to entrust all the reins of power to the
HDZ. 

Kosor won in only two of Croatia’s 20 counties, and even there
by a thin margin. She also carried the diaspora vote, with a
massive majority of 88 percent. Most out-of-country votes came from
ethnic Croats in Herzegovina, the southwestern area of Bosnia and
Herzegovina along the border with Croatia, where the HDZ has a
stable and loyal base. It may well have been due to the
Herzegovinian voters that Kosor managed to go into a second
round. 

A dark-horse candidate

As the votes of the first round were coming in, Kosor trailed
not just Mesic but also another candidate, Boris Miksic, whom she
eventually overtook once the results from Herzegovina were added.
Miksic, who lives in the United States and was a complete unknown
until recently, surprised everyone by getting around 18 percent of
the vote. 

Analysts attributed Miksic’s strong showing to a general
dissatisfaction with Croatia’s political establishment; the HDZ in
particular also lost votes from its traditional nationalist base
because of Prime Minister Sanader’s pro-European reform
course. 

Miksic’s campaign was marked by a conservative, slightly
right-wing rhetoric, garnished with an autobiographical tale in
which he presented himself as a self-made businessman who had made
it big in America. 

The story turned out to be as much invention as
reality. 

Miksic had, in fact, made most of his fortune (which in any case
was much more modest than he had suggested) in the early 1990s
through shady arms deals with Stjepan Tudjman, son of late
president Franjo Tudjman. He had also been the subject of a
restraining order in the state of Minnesota stemming from a
domestic dispute, according to the daily Jutarnji list. 

Contrary to most forecasts, the majority of Miksic’s supporters
voted not for Kosor but for Mesic in the runoff. 

Mesic’s victory was also helped by the fact that Kosor turned
out to be a weak rival. She failed not only to reach out to non-HDZ
voters but also to mobilize the HDZ’s traditional base. 

At first she seemed vague and tepid, but as the campaign went on
her rhetoric became fiercer, and she started criticizing and
attacking Mesic. She did so with few arguments and even fewer
concrete ideas on how to get the country on the path to prosperity,
other than promising more generous social measures for war
veterans, pensioners, and mothers. 

In the three television debates with Mesic, she failed to
clearly address any of the important issues. 

But it is also true that there were no fundamental policy
differences between the two candidates, who both vowed to bring the
country into the EU. 

Ivan Siber, a political scientist at the University of Zagreb,
described Kosor’s behavior during the campaign as “incredibly
aggressive” and some of her answers as complete political
failures. 

When asked on the RTL TV channel what she would do if she saw
General Ante Gotovina in the street, she replied she wouldn’t do
anything because she hadn’t seen him in a long time and would
probably not recognize him. 

Gotovina has been on the run since being indicted by the
Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia for war crimes. Croatia’s failure to arrest and
extradite him has been the single-most important obstacle in the
country’s EU bid. 

Another example Siber mentioned was Kosor’s suggestion to hold a
referendum on the right to abortion. Kosor does not support
abortion rights, and Siber thinks this tactic was misguided because
70 percent of the Croatian population does. Siber concluded that
Kosor did not even try to appeal to centrist or center-left voters
but instead tried to mobilize the disgruntled HDZ base with talk
about the late Franjo Tudjman and Croatia’s war of independence
from Yugoslavia–without succeeding. 

Kosor also often played the gender card, but voters may just
have thought this wasn’t particularly relevant one way or another.
Vesna Lamza Posavec from the Ivo Pilar Institute of Social Sciences
said that around one-third of HDZ voters want only men to occupy
high office and therefore didn’t vote for Kosor, while many non-HDZ
women voted for her precisely because she’s a woman. On balance,
Lamza Posavec believes, her gender may have hurt Kosor, but only
marginally if at all. 

To read the full text of the article, visit the Transitions Online website.