Debate

In the shadow of incredibly beautiful scenes from Belgrade, and potentially finally the new enlargement of the European Union to Montenegro, Croatia entered the last week before the first round of presidential elections, which will be held on Sunday, December 29.

So that in that rarely uninteresting and senseless campaign we would also see the only face-to-face of all the candidates on HRT, after which all those stories about Croatia becoming a much more decent and at least elementary democratic and literate society, but what happened in the 1990s , fall into the water. Here I must immediately sprinkle myself with ashes and admit that I was personally convinced of this, as well as that I spoke about it publicly several times. However, when one looks at, and actually listens to, the offer of the presidential candidates, one cannot remain anything but defeated, then admit one's own delusion and remain confused before the flood of senseless right-wing and generally ideological articulation of the people who ran in the campaign.

If we leave aside the peculiar Nika Tokić Kartel, a man for whom it remains completely unclear how he managed to find himself among the candidates, because he was unable to coherently articulate an answer to any of the questions, we actually have a situation in which six right-wing and essentially nationalist candidates have emerged and only Ivan Kekin who is not that, and who, not only because of that, looked like she got lost in the show. Wherein Miro Bulj, Tomislav Jonjić and Branka Lozo undisguisedly appear as hard-core right-wing candidates and sound like robots who constantly repeat the same mantra, the literal content of which is as follows: God and the Croats are on one side, of course inseparable, and that inseparable entity is endangered freemasons, Serbs, Yugoslavs, communists, migrants and gender ideologies.

HDZ candidate Dragan Primorac presents himself as a unifying president, and it is a great shame that none of the people running his campaign recognized the self-ironic potential of the marketing slogan, 'The first unifying person after Alexander'. Primorac is characterized by an excess of general places, kitsch, pathos and a lack of any consistency, as well as an undisguised closeness to Netanyahu, which he managed to keep silent even on several direct questions from Ivana Kekin.

Among all those candidates from the right, Marija Selak Raspudić turned out to be an intellectual colossus, which was not at all demanding, focusing mainly on the current president and pointing out his inconsistency, emphasizing unity in commanding the army as the greatest value and reason for candidacy. Which actually implies that she would achieve that unity with Hadeze's prime minister.

Zoran Milanović himself, who falsely presents himself as a social democrat and candidate of the liberal left throughout his career, is unquestionably more politically literate than the other candidates, but nothing could hide his essential nationalism, anti-Western isolationist policy and obsession with the army as such. But the best, and at the same time the funniest thing he said, just before he finished the thought and said who the fantastic great man was whose quote he used, was the first sentence in which he stripped himself to the end. Namely, Milanović is most certainly the first, and let's hope the last relevant political actor in Croatia, who turned Vladek Maček into a great thinker, and his stupid thesis about how the small have a place under the table, while the big fight, rose to the pedestal of the supreme political imperative. Why and how this home defense in its authentic essence, which actually served as a disincentive thought directed against the initiation of partisan struggle, i.e. anti-fascist uprising, suddenly became a guiding thought and why Zoran Milanović celebrates the anniversaries of partisan uprisings and important anti-fascist dates at all, remains unclear. Not to mention the inconsistency. It is true that this phrase serves him to concretely wash his hands of aid to Ukraine, which does not change the fact that he gives the impression of a well-read and consistent man and a dominant rhetorician to average voters simply because he avoids serious confrontations in the public space, with people for whom such a pose does not go well .

And Ivana Kekin remains at the end, arguably the most decent candidate and the only one who does not come from the right, which is why she will get some authentic leftist votes. But again, and this was confirmed at the debate, we are talking about a person who has political passions, but who is essentially not a political being. Confirmation for this thesis can also be found in her claim from the campaign that she does not know who Nikica Jelavić is, a man about whom everyone who lived in Croatia and followed the news for the last thirty years had at least basic information. But we can also find it in the fact that her main target of the debate was once again the HDZ candidate, and not the current president, whose voters she should be targeting, as well as his false representation as a candidate of the left to finally be seriously publicly unmasked.

Basically, judging by the presidential candidates and the topics discussed, with the exception of the health care situation, it seems as if we are living in the endless nineties and the war ended yesterday.

(pešcanik.net)