In the first round of local elections, voters in Croatia elected prefects in ten counties, and the mayors of eighty cities are already known.
HDZ achieved a slightly better result than in the last elections, while SDP suffered a heavy defeat in Rijeka and Sisak, Professor Ivan Rimac from the Zagreb Faculty of Law tells DW.
"Traditionally, HDZ wins a lot of units due to its penetration into all corners of society. Other parties, which are the opposition in the national parliament, mainly fight for those local government units that have a larger budget," says Rimac.
He criticizes the fact that there are "too many local government units" in which in some cases there are very few candidates, or even only one.
HDZ "advanced" compared to the last elections
"This year, due to President Milanović's great success in winning a second term, the impression was somehow created that HDZ would have worse results at the local level. But that did not happen. HDZ even improved compared to the previous elections and won more seats," Professor Rimac assesses.
In his opinion, the national-level opposition failed to achieve a better result, or at least repeat the previous ones, mainly due to disunity and individual performances in the elections for individual cities and counties.
Of the larger cities, the elections were completed only in Osijek, where HDZ candidate Ivan Radić convincingly triumphed in the first round with over seventy percent of the vote.
A second round will be held in early June, including in Zagreb, in which incumbent mayor Tomislav Tomašević (48 percent) enters as the favorite in a clash with independent candidate Marija Selak Raspudić (16 percent).
SDP's fiasco in Rijeka
In Split, the second round will be an uncertain race between Ivica Puljak from the Center (35 percent) and HDZ candidate Tomislav Šuta (31 percent).
The SDP suffered a fiasco in Rijeka, with independent candidate Iva Rinčić (41 percent) and Marko Filipović (19 percent), the candidate of a group of citizens and the until-recent SDP mayor who left the party, entering the second round of the mayoral race.
The SDP will therefore not have a representative in the second round of elections for the first person of the City of Rijeka – their candidate Sandra Krpan was only third in the first round of elections, which ended the SDP's dominance in Rijeka that had lasted for more than three decades.
"The SDP made a number of mistakes, primarily that they did not join the coalition of opposition parties at the local level against the HDZ. The SDP also lost one very important county, which is Sisak-Moslavina County, where the HDZ's promises of further reconstruction after the earthquake had a greater impact than their campaign," says Professor Rimac.
Croatian Prime Minister and HDZ President Andrej Plenković was pleased with the result.
"The Prime Minister and the HDZ were not overly confident that it would go so well. The hype that the SDP had over Milanović's victory in the presidential elections created a certain panic within the ranks of the HDZ. That is why they operated on three different levels in the campaign," says Professor Rimac.
Three levels of campaign
"They sent a number of ministers to run for mayor or other local positions, signaling that they desperately want to win these elections, and that they are therefore going with the strongest candidates wherever possible."
"And where they did not want to sacrifice ministers, they went with promises from the central government about large investments in those areas where they had somewhat weaker candidates. And the third level of the campaign was the very active State Public Prosecutor's Office, which questioned and detained opposition candidates for any suspicion of illegal actions," Rimac lists.
Promises and dependence on central government
The professor from the Faculty of Law in Zagreb reminds that in some local units, the HDZ has been in power since 1990. Given the fragmentation of self-government units, their large number, and the fact that many of them are not financially strong enough, Rimac says that the results of the past local elections increasingly show that Croatia is slipping into a "one-party state."
For what?
"This stems from the central government's promise that it will only assist local government units in which their, HDZ, candidates have come to power," he says.
Larger cities like Zagreb, or local government units that are financially strong, such as those in northwest Croatia, are an exception to this trend, notes Rimac.
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