Croatia’s first female president ousted in vote by ex-PM who won entry to EU
- Former prime minister Zoran Milanovic defeats the incumbent conservative leader Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic
- The second-round election was held just days after Croatia took over the European Union’s helm for a six-month period
Croatians shot down President Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic’s bid for a second term, electing the prime minister who led the nation into the European Union to rebalance politics in the bloc’s newest member.
Zoran Milanovic, who ran the Adriatic state’s government from 2011 to 2015, won 52.7 per cent of votes in Sunday’s presidential runoff, according to partial results with almost 100 per cent counted. Kitarovic, a former Nato executive whose popularity unexpectedly plummeted in the last weeks of the campaign after she was tied to the scandal-plagued mayor of Zagreb, got 47.3 per cent.
Kitarovic’s defeat could spell trouble for her ally Andrej Plenkovic, the current prime minister, before general elections in the fall and just after his government took over the EU’s rotating presidency.
While she reached out to voters embracing anti-immigrant positions seen in fellow EU states Poland and Hungary, Milanovic vowed to reject extremism, fight graft, and stop the outflow of young people who have left Croatia to seek better lives in western Europe.
“This is the victory for everyone, not only for those who are ethnic Croats, but for all citizens,” Milanovic told cheering supporters in Zagreb.
“In my term, I’ll try to listen to everyone, and try not to hurt anyone, because we’re all different.”
While the president’s role is largely ceremonial, the office commands the armed forces and decides over foreign-policy appointments with the premier. It also provides a political platform and Milanovic’s opposition-leading Social Democratic party is looking for any edge it can get over Plenkovic’s conservative Croatian Democratic Union.
“The result is a big blow to right-wing voters,” said Nenad Zakosek, political science professor at the University of Zagreb.
The rivals also differed on who the nation’s biggest ally is. While Kitarovic said it was the US, and touted when she met President Donald Trump, Milanovic said Croatia depended most on ties with the EU.
But the main issue before the presidential vote was corruption, and Kitarovic’s campaign suffered after she was filmed singing Happy Birthday and giving a cake to Zagreb Mayor Milan Bandic.
He’s fighting graft accusations over the granting of preferential access to stalls at Zagreb’s Christmas market.
The accusations, which Bandic denies, come at a sensitive time for former Yugoslav republic of 4.2 million, which joined the EU in 2013 and took over the EU’s six-month rotating presidency on January 1. During the term, it will organise meetings that may decide important issues including Brexit and the bloc’s next seven-year budget.
The bloc is scrutinising Croatia’s readiness to adopt the euro and join Schengen, the EU’s passport-free travel zone. Graft concerns delayed similar efforts in nearby Bulgaria, adding pressure to Croatia, which is ranked fifth-worst in the EU by Transparency International.
“Milanovic’s victory means all bets are off now for parliamentary election in the fall,” said Zarko Puhovski from the University of Zagreb.
“For the rest of the year we will have an unclear picture of where the real power in the country is situated.”
