ZAGREB, September 8, 2018 - An informal group of 81 members of the opposition Social Democratic Party (SDP) on Friday called on party chief Davor Bernardić to step down immediately over "his disastrous leadership" and his causing a major decline in the party ratings, demanding that elections for new party bodies be held by the end of the year and that all sanctions imposed on party members who have spoken critically about the situation in the SDP be withdrawn.
The disgruntled SDP members called on the SDP Main Committee to make the relevant decisions at its next session and on all party members to state their views and support their demands through party bodies.
Attending the meeting, which was held in Kamanje (about 70 kilometres southwest of Zagreb, close to the Slovenian border), were four suspended members of the SDP Presidency - Siniša Hajdaš Dončić, Peđa Grbin, Mihael Zmajlović and Vedran Babić, as well as Igor Dragovan, Nenad Stazić, Željko Jovanović, member of the European Parliament Biljana Borzan, party whip Arsen Bauk and other prominent members of the SDP.
Talking to reporters after the meeting, Hajdaš Dončić said that the signatories to the request that Bernardić should step down were joined by many SDP members who served as mayors or county heads. He said that with a new leadership, the SDP could again become a progressive political party and that social changes were possible if the SDP changed.
Borzan told reporters that the SDP needed "a resetting". "There are no ideological differences between us, but there is evidently a conflict of different concepts of how the party should function," she said.
Mišel Jakšić, the SDP mayor of Koprivnica, said that the SDP needed a change for the better and that he had stated on several occasions that Primorje-Gorski Kotar county head Zlatko Komadina could be a "stabilising solution".
