A full quarter of a century should have passed, because these days it will be twenty-five years since the death of Franjo Tuđman, to formally conclude the process of re-Tuđmanization of Croatia, which began sometime around 2013.
It will formally come to an end after, after the second round of the upcoming presidential elections, Zoran Milanović wins the expected second term in a row and extends his stay in Pantovčak for the next four years. Given that this scenario can prevent the only miracle, which is that the left and liberal electorate finally sees through and starts really listening to what this man says, represents and does, instead of continuing to see him as the only beacon of resistance to the HDZ and the long-term president SDP, and we all know that miracles do not happen often and that love can be blind for a long time, even if it is unrequited, Croatia will indeed have a new Tuđman at the head of the country.
True, cynics can now, even with a lot of arguments, conclude that the 1990s certainly did not go anywhere and that the HDZ is in fact the ruling party in Croatia, however, a literal follower of such a disastrous politician who produced the worst that could happen to Croatia. it really hasn't been all these years.
For those who were not even born at that time or were too young, as well as for those who suppressed that period, it is worth noting that after Tuđman's death and the severe defeat of the HDZ in the parliamentary elections, society was seething with the desire to de-Tuđmanize and completely forget his era and the practices he introduced. Because of this, after all, Stipe Mesić, as a complete outsider, but also a total character and then political antipode to Tuđman, ran over Dražen Budiša. And because of this, he himself, with the overwhelming desire of almost the entire society and political scene, agreed without question to the thorough disempowerment of the office of the president from serious powers. Then, during his mandate, the prime ministerial system was established, and the semi-presidential system was dispossessed. When Ivo Josipović, perceived as the embodiment of a decent civil left, was elected to the post of president after him, it was clear that the citizens did not want a new Tuđman in that position under any circumstances. And the same thing was true with the only return of HDZ to Pantovčak and the arrival of Kolinda Grabar Kitarović in that place. Because, as much as she was an authentic HDZ candidate, she was a politician without any qualities of her own and a typical career diplomat, who ranked highly in the NATO bureaucratic apparatus. When at the end of her mandate she completely lost her temper and started to become a professional right-winger, it was actually her behavior that brought Zoran Milanović to that position in the current term, who presented himself throughout the campaign as a "normal" president, who would not be right-wing and who would normalize society.
Moreover, all that time, even in the position of prime minister, in which Ivica Račan took turns, then Ivo Sanader, who really worked on de-Germanization, then Milanović himself and finally, after a tragicomic six-month intermezzo with Tihomir Orešković, Andrej Plenković, without regardless of all the formal vows of the Hadeze people to Franjo Tuđman, their ideological and political practice made a significant departure from him.
And then in the current mandate of Zoran Milanović, what happened that was clear to anyone who allowed himself to believe what he himself said and advocated in recent years, including in relation to Franjo Tuđman, is that the current president of Croatia completely exposed himself as the most authentic Tuđmanist in Croatian politics. So that it doesn't seem like I'm writing this as an afterthought, it's easy to check on the web how many years I've been saying this same thing, but it reaches few of his voters. Which is why I don't think it's a matter of current political calculation or calculated capture of right-wing votes. No, Zoran Milanović simply sincerely admires Tuđman and his politics, he openly spoke about it when he was the outgoing prime minister, on his initiative the Zagreb airport was named after Tuđman, he is the most agile promoter of the story of Croatia's innocence in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. he is a man who decorated a whole series of suspected war heroes and a man who keeps the flame of the revolution from the nineties no less alive than HDZ does, he is someone who gets along best and often sees Milorad Dodik, but at the same time he is full of arrogance when discussing relations with Serbia. In addition to all that, in relation to the European Union, geopolitics and the region, we have a practically mirror image of Tuđman, who nominally wanted to go to the West, but resisted, for nationalist reasons, any request to harmonize his policy with the West, formulating it with the following sentence: "We belong to Europe and we want to join the European Union, but with our own identity, upright and without dictates." It is practically identical to what Zoran Milanović has been saying in recent months, with the only difference being that the country is now in European Union, and then it wasn't.
At the end of it all, in order to dispel all doubts, Milanović took as the slogan of the new campaign Tuđman's slogan from 1997, "President for the President", taking a photo along the way with Tuđman's facial grimace and at the same table, so that there would be no confusion about the message which he wants to send.
If we add to this the fact that the presidential elections in 1997 were the darkest, that Tuđmanism was at its worst at that time, that the Gotovac government was practically assassinated in that campaign, things become even darker.
Yes, almost the entire Croatian political scene, as well as a good part of the media and intellectual scene, has been actively retouching Tuđman and the nineties for more than ten years, completely falsifying that era and offering some mythological past with him as an unquestionable great, but Milanović unquestionably brought the matter to end and will certainly end that process when he wins the second mandate.
And for his crazed fans from the left, many of whom couldn't stand Tuđman, nothing will be problematic or clear even then, because he is "against Plenković and the HDZ".
Bonus video:
