Croatian Parliamentary Elections 2007
By Marko Rakar, Member of the EAPC

Last Sunday (November 25) Croatia held regular elections for the sixth session of parliament. In an extremely close race presenting SDP (social democrats) as its favorites, the relative winner turned out to be current ruling party HDZ (Croatian democratic union) with 66 seats (61 seats won in Croatia, and 5 more with Croatian citizens living abroad) against SDP and its 56 seats. Croatian political landscape changed radically within the last few months after SDP leader Ivica Racan died of cancer in late April this year which opened process of electing new SDP president. Zoran Milanovic who won the party elections was a person unknown to the public since he did not hold any public office before.

Furthermore, at about the same time SDP started with presentations of their policies for new government, beginning with economy policies, which was created by Mr. Ljubo Jurcic, who was later chosen SDP prime minister candidate. During campaign HDZ and SDP clashed heavily, especially HDZ that was in power and choose a number of different steps to coincide with campaign dates (public sale of Croatian telecom shares, return of debt to the retired persons was also rescheduled to be delivered just few days before elections instead of mid December). HDZ also implied that SDP will legalize drugs, impose new property taxes, remove religious education from schools, ban Croats living outside of Croatia from voting, etc...

At the same time, SDP tried to win sympathy of the voters with their economy program which proposed changes in tax law, particularly in creating capital gain tax (and cutting some other taxes in return), limiting voting rights of Croats living in Bosnia and Herzegovina (since they are constitutional part of Bosnia and they have BiH citizenship), as well as proposing deep changes and reorganization of ailing health system, regional development and zero tolerance for corruption for which Croatia is repeatedly criticized by EU.

HDZ campaign was handled by a PR team lead by well known Irish political consultant PJ Mara, while SDP campaign was done by Croatian team with some organizational help from British «The campaign company» (which is close to UK’s Labor party). Other parties that have passed census are Croatian peasant party, Croatian social liberals, Istrian Democratic Party, Croatian pensioner’s party as well as two far right wing parties HSP and HDSSB.

During the campaign the electorate was heavily divided which resulted in the actual situation where HDZ is holding 66 seats while SDP controls 56. New session of parliament will have 153 representatives and neither HDZ nor SDP have enough seats to form government. Since political scene is polarized it is not clear who will actually get a chance to form the government since Croatian constitution prescribes that president will give this opportunity to the person «who shows proof of support of majority of parliament representatives». At this time nobody can show 77 signatures and Croatia is now facing a difficult decision on what constitutes majority in this case.

As far as evaluation of campaigning goes, HDZ started with negative campaigning aided by a number of events paid for and marketed by government offices and ministries and later on replaced it with positive campaign based on mostly false or unproven claims (for example they claimed that 435km of new highways were built although journalists were able to find only 115km). SDP used positive and discrete campaigning which was overshadowed by the number of outdoor ads by HDZ (up to four HDZ posters on one SDP), HDZ had more TV time then all other parties combined, and speaking of TV it is worth stating that according to the rules, all participants in elections have exactly the same air time (so that someone who collected five hundred signatures uses same air time as any other party with tens of thousands of party members and hundreds of thousands supporters).

Campaigning was also done on the Internet and plenty of airtime and newspaper articles were dedicated to this part of political fight. Although parties themselves used their web sites to present their programs, we have seen a lot of effort in presenting media rich content (usually through youtube video clips), presentations (slideshare) as well as going to the voters directly through myspace and facebook profiles.

It is interesting to note that the majority of political content was created by voters themselves either through youtube clips (some of them have been seen hundreds of thousands of times) or through organized blogging campaigns.

These were the third elections with same election rules. Croatia does not have Election financing law and Party-financing law is funny at its best (and HDZ does not comply with it since there are no known consequences).


The role of the mass media in the construction of Europe

EAPC President, Bo Krogvig, was one of the speakers at the seminar “The Role of the Mass Media in the Construction of Europe” organized by the Basque Government, with the collaboration of the European Commission and the Basque Network of European Information (REVIE) which was supposed to open a discussion between representatives of institutions, mass media, social organizations and citizenry in general, with regard to the role of the media in the construction of Europe. The seminar was held in the Auditorium at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

The Organization was able to count on the participation of 17 personalities, including, among others, Margot Wallström, Vice-President of the European Commission, Jeremy Rifkin, President of the 'Foundation on Economic Trends', Claus Sørensen, Director-General of Directorate General Communication of the European Commission, Stefano Rolando, former Director of the Information Department of the Presidency for the Italian Council of Ministers, and Cristophe Midol-Monnet, editor of Euronews.

The Seminar was attended by about 250 persons, fundamentally from the institutional and university field, as well as numerous professionals from the mass media.

The program for the Seminar was organized around an inaugural keynote speech, made by Jeremy Rifkin, and 2 panels. The first panel, entitled “European Union communication policy”, analyzed the way in which European institutions inform and communicate about their activities and projects. The second panel, “Civil society, press and public opinion in the future of the EU”, on its part, focused on the debate on how civil society sees the future of the Union and what role the media should play in communicating the European idea to society.

For more information about the seminar click here

To read the speech of Mr. Krogvig, please, click here

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