Croatia Vote Puts Pressure on the New Regime to Right Past Wrongs

The electoral defeat of Croatia’s old-guard nationalists was so crushing that the landslide surprised even the winners, who are now under heavy pressure to turn the corruption-riddled country around quickly.

A center-left coalition’s victory over the ruling Croatian Democratic Union, or HDZ, on Monday means that the new government has to move immediately to clean up the legacy of graft and hard-line nationalism of late President Franjo Tudjman, said political analyst Josip Kregar.

Croatia’s voters came close to setting a record with a turnout of more than 78%, and they handed a powerful mandate to the winning alliance led by former Communist apparatchik Ivica Racan and onetime anti-Communist dissident Drazen Budisa.

With 99% of the ballots counted Tuesday night, the opposition alliance of Social Democrats and Social Liberals had won nine of the legislature’s 11 electoral districts.

Under Croatia’s complicated voting system, that result will probably translate into 70 seats for the opposition alliance in the 152-seat lower house, and a planned coalition with a second opposition alliance would add 24 more seats, state television predicted.

The HDZ can expect only about 48 seats. If those numbers turn out to be correct, the opposition’s grand alliance will be close to the two-thirds majority it needs to rewrite the constitution.

Racan, a pragmatist sometimes criticized for being too quick to compromise, is now almost certain to be Croatia’s next prime minister. Possibly setting the stage for a bitter power struggle, Tudjman’s foreign minister, Mate Granic, is a front-runner to be elected president when voters return to the polls Jan. 24.

But the opposition’s dominance in Monday’s parliamentary poll has improved the presidential hopes of Budisa, who was jailed in 1971 for his anti-Communist activism.

Budisa and Racan were conciliatory toward the HDZ after the ruling party’s humiliating defeat, but the voters who threw the party’s members out of office are in no mood to let corrupt officials off the hook and will insist on prosecutions, Kregar said.

He said he expects that many political scandals covered up by Tudjman and his cronies will be uncovered, especially ones related to the privatization of state-owned industries to the benefit of close allies of Tudjman, who died of stomach cancer last month.

“It will be almost impossible to forgive them because of the atmosphere in society,” said Kregar, a political analyst in the law faculty at Zagreb University. “Even though people will, I expect, be moderate, the atmosphere right now is very much in favor of a very strict and fast reaction.”

Kregar has felt the public anger toward Tudjman’s cronies in some of the most surprising places, such as from a roomful of 120 police inspectors and from the deputy minister responsible for cleaning up organized crime--agents of the very government accused of being in league with the crooks.

Kregar was trying to show the police how the fight against organized crime isn’t always a gentle matter and came to the example of the West African nation of Ghana under Jerry J. Rawlings, who executed at least 150 people after he came to power in a coup 18 years ago.

The police inspectors reacted to the story “with big applause,” Kregar said. “There was a standing ovation. I was very much embarrassed.”

Not everyone in Croatia’s powerful police and military forces will be so enthusiastic if the new government decides to dismantle the corrupt and repressive political machine that Tudjman built.

The state’s secret police, and numerous military commanders whom Tudjman promoted--more for their obedience than their competence--are only some of those in a position to cause trouble if they feel threatened by Croatia’s reformers.

Croatian hard-liners in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina, who worked to block multiethnic integration and democratic reforms there--with a lifeline of money and arms from authorities in Zagreb, the Croatian capital--also stand to lose now that the HDZ is out of power.

Several European governments Tuesday welcomed the party’s defeat as a possible turning point in efforts to build a lasting peace in the Balkans, including the promise to return hundreds of thousands of Serbs and Muslims to their homes in Bosnia and Croatia.

The alliance, led by Racan’s Social Democrats, promised during the campaign to end Croatia’s isolation by, for instance, cooperating with war crimes investigators.

In return, the new government is likely to press for aid to revive the economy and cut Croatia’s 20% unemployment, such as rescheduling Zagreb’s massive foreign debt.