Pre-Election Storm

Vladimir Seks on Wednesday, September 20, dismissed the House of Representatives of the Croatian Parliament. According to the Constitution, President Tudjman is to schedule new parliamentary elections within 60 days. Thus, the electoral race, anticipated in Croatia in mid-summer, and as far as the ruling party was concerned begun after operation 'Flash', has officially started. The elections have been scheduled for December. This is probably the time limit in which the ruling party could rely on the popularity gained by military operation 'Storm', undertaken at the time when the party's rating was at its lowest and threatening to drop even further.

Operation 'Storm', which HDZ officials take credit for and consider as purely a party matter, has raised HDZ popularity to the heavens. At least that is what surveys say: 50 percent of the citizens of Croatia would now vote for HDZ, 60 percent of the voters would vote for Tudjman, while as many as a quarter of them would elect him president for life. Tudjman acted in his usual Leninist manner: if he had announced elections a day earlier, it would have been too early, if he had announced them a day later, it would have been too late. Never in the past four years has HDZ been so strong.

Breaking down the opposition: HDZ has, of course, almost completed all the preparations for the forthcoming elections. Nothing has been left to chance. First came the personnel consolidation which simply broke down the weak Croatian opposition. Deputy of the Croatian National Party Mirko Tankosic joined HDZ and was the first Serb in the ruling party. Others joined in after him. Damir Zoric, of the Croatian Social Liberal Party (HSLS) joined HDZ saying that the party's national dimension was more important to him than the liberal dimension. He was followed by Mate Mestrovic, son of the renowned sculptor Ivan Mestrovic, who said that liberalism was too highly ranked in HSLS and that HSLS leader Drazen Budisa had not been "overwhelmed enough" by the Croatian army's victory in operation 'Storm'.

At the same time, the media got the final blow. The state had been controlling over 90 percent of the media and now `Globus', the privately owned weekly with the highest circulation in Croatia, had to replace its editor-in-chief Denis Kuljis who practically made the weekly. Kuljis was replaced apparently under the pressure of the ruling party by Davor Butkovic, until recently Kuljis's deputy, who will be running the weekly in a different way, certainly less dangerous for HDZ. So the Split weekly 'Feral' has remained the only influential independent newspaper in Croatia, which certainly cannot significantly affect the electorate when all other dailies and electronic media resemble one another so much that it is difficult to tell them apart.

The new Electoral Law enables the Croatian diaspora to elect representatives in the Parliament, which is one of the few cases of this kind in the world. The Croats living abroad will elect as many as 12 representatives, which means that (unless a miracle occurs) HDZ can count on 12 more seats in the Parliament. At the same time, the number of Serb representatives has been cut down to three, although there has been no census, and Bosnian Muslims got no seats at all (though they used to be the second-largest ethnic minority, after the Serbs, and are now certainly the largest). This urged Alija Izetbegovic to write a letter to Tudjman asking him to ensure one seat for them. There has been no reply to this request so far.