ZAGREB, February 15, 2019 - There will be no referendums on changes to the election law or on repealing the Council of Europe Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, the Croatian parliament decided by a majority vote on Friday.

With 105 votes in favour, 16 against and two abstentions, the parliament upheld the conclusion of its Committee on the Constitution, Standing Orders and Political System which said that conditions had not been met to call the two nation-wide referendums, initiated by two civil society groups - The People Decide and The Truth About the Istanbul Convention.

Explaining its conclusion, the committee recalled that in July 2018 the parliament called on the government to check the number and authenticity of the collected signatures and the lawfulness of their collection, noting that the government has submitted a report from which it arises that the number of signatures required to call a referendum was not collected for either referendum.

"Those of us who have voted against, on behalf of the MOST party, will walk out of the session," said MOST MP Robert Podolnjak.

The Constitution and the Constitutional Law on the Constitutional Court, under which the parliament must address the Constitutional Court on the matter and does not have the right to decide autonomously not to call a national referendum or that conditions for it have not been met, have been breached, said Podolnjak.

The parliamentary vote on the two referendums was also observed by representatives of the two civil society groups which over the past few months had been accusing the government of doing all in its power to prevent the two referendums.

The parliament's vote prompted an ironic round of applause from observers of the two civil society groups.

There is significant difference between politicians, members of parliament and voyeurs, independent MP Marko Vučetić responded. "Voyeurs think that they can enter the area of other people's privacy and personal information, they think that the status of an MP gives them the right to violate others' right to privacy," Vučetić said.

Boris Milošević of the Independent Democratic Serb Party (SDSS), too, said that not enough signatures had been collected and referred those dissatisfied with that to the Personal Data Protection Agency (AZOP). "I regret that the referendum questions will not be discussed by the Constitutional Court because they would not pass the test of constitutionality," said Milošević.

Among other things, the referendum petition for changing the election law proposed reducing the number of parliamentary seats for the Serb minority from three, which is how many seats the minority is now entitled to, to one seat.

Milorad Batinić of the Croatian People's Party (HNS), a partner in the ruling majority, said that back in October last year his party had filed a report over unlawful activities during the campaign to collect signatures for the two referendums and signature forgery.

MP Hrvoje Zekanović of the HRAST party used the vote on repealing the Istanbul Convention to approach the speaker's desk and put on it a T-shirt with the message "Two sexes, two genders".

"Here is a T-shirt, not for you but for Prime Minister Andrej Plenković as a memento of the Istanbul Convention," Zekanović told Speaker Gordan Jandroković. "You can wear it yourself, it will fit you nicely," Jandroković countered.

More news on the referendums in Croatia can be found in the Politics section.

ZAGREB, February 10, 2019 - The leader of the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS), Krešo Beljak, said on Saturday he was certain that the HSS could make a positive surprise at the forthcoming European elections, and that the Amsterdam Coalition could become the strongest political group in Croatia.

"All together, as a party, we must work even better at all levels and we will prove that we will and can do this at the elections scheduled for May," Beljak told a party conference in Jastrebarsko, just southwest of Zagreb.

He said that the HSS would have three candidates on the list of 12 candidates to be fielded by the Amsterdam Coalition: Beljak himself, "as a leader who doesn't shrink from responsibility", independent candidate Zoran Bahtijarević and long-standing party member and economic expert Damir Novotny.

"I am certain that the HSS as a party, all of us here, and all our members throughout Croatia, can make a positive surprise and, with preferential votes for one of the three of the HSS candidates, gather enough votes to claim a victory at the elections for the European Parliament in 2019, and that our coalition, our alliance led by the HSS, can become the strongest political group in Croatia," Beljak said.

He recalled that the negotiations launched last autumn to gather together parties that could run together in the European Parliament elections had been productive and that as a result the HSS was now the leader of the Amsterdam Coalition. "It is an honour to us all that all these parties and all their prominent politicians have recognised and accepted the HSS as the leader of the whole coalition. That gives us additional strength and motivation to justify the confidence our coalition partners have placed in us."

Presenting a report on his work in the last seven months since the previous such conference, Beljak said that the HSS's approval ratings were far below what he would have wanted, but added that the ratings were increasing steadily. "We can only imagine what our ratings would be had all our former members, who did all they could to harm their party, focused their energies on strengthening the party," he said.

Delegates adopted Beljak's report and the new party statute. The report was adopted with five votes against and the statute with four votes against and one abstention. The conference was attended by 623 of 727 delegates, the party's secretariat told Hina.

More news on the European elections can be found in the Politics section.

ZAGREB, February 7, 2019 - People are increasingly losing their trust in political processes and it is necessary to ensure that the internet and social media become more transparent so that people can make political decisions on their own, the GONG election monitoring NGO said in Zagreb on Thursday at a conference on possible threats to democracy during this year's European Parliament elections.

"We hope that before campaigning for the European Parliament elections officially starts, we can warn of and prevent the risks of new technologies and previous negative experience in Croatia being repeated," GONG director Jelena Berković said.

"We have to keep in mind that we are living in a country where campaigning on social networks during the second to last parliamentary election is now included in an indictment for money laundering which in fact was committed by a digital team who ran that election campaign," Berković said.

On the occasion of Global Elections Day, and ahead of May's election for the European Parliament, GONG organised a conference about online threats to democracy, with experts discussing cyber security and personal data protection as well as hate speech and preventing fake news in political campaigns.

The conference was organised with the support of the British Embassy, and Ambassador Andrew Dalgleish said it was necessary to arouse interest and inform people in an effort to motivate them to participate in political processes.

Many democratic countries have that problem - disillusionment and distance from political processes. They consider that to be someone else's problem. The media are one of the ways to once again include people in political processes, Dalgleish said in his welcome speech.

Elizabeth Carolan, the founder of the Transparent Referendum Initiative in Ireland - a civic initiative that was established to advocate for increased transparency of digital advertising during electoral campaigns in Ireland, presented the results of a survey on social networks which identified a large number of advertisements targeted at directly influencing voters' decisions.

The head of the European Parliament Liaison Office in Zagreb, Violeta Simeonova Staničić, spoke about the campaign slogan "This Time I'm Voting" as a positive example of informing citizens of key events and policies related to the EU and European Parliament.

More news on the European Parliament elections in Croatia can be found in the Politics section.

ZAGREB, February 4, 2019 - Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said on Sunday that his HDZ party would win May's European Parliament elections convincingly despite the fact that some populist parties were trying to win over a portion of its electorate.

Speaking to the press during a visit to the southern town of Imotski, Plenković said that most people were aware of and appreciated what the HDZ-led government had done and would choose their true representatives.

"The HDZ will once again win the European elections because we are the only true Croatian and European party," Plenković said, adding that his party was also "the strongest nation-building, patriotic, Christian Democrat and people's party in Croatia."

He said that in Croatian political practice parties in power mostly lose public support, but that relevant opinion polls show that this did not happen to the HDZ this time, while at the same time public support for the strongest opposition SDP party has almost been halved and "protest parties" have no solutions.

"Some of the populist parties are on a mission to win over a portion of the HDZ's electorate and that's their sole goal," Plenković said.

The prime minister said that some of them would be pushing for a referendum to get Croatia out of the European Union. "They will be saying, 'why should others decide for us?', but those are just lies," he said, noting that Croatia had received 357 million euro for the Pelješac Bridge construction project and 165 million euro for the reconstruction of Dubrovnik's airport.

The HDZ's political secretary, Lovro Kuščević, told reporters in Imotski that the party was finalising its programme for the European Parliament elections and that it would be presented to the public as soon as it was adopted by party bodies.

He said that the HDZ would run on its own and that the names of the candidates would be made public soon.

Kuščević said that the HDZ expected to win at least five seats in the European Parliament, adding that the party would continue to raise public awareness of the importance of Croatia's membership of the European Union.

"We will continue to lobby within the EU for Croatian projects so that the development of Croatia could continue," Kuščević said.

More news on the European elections can be found in the Politics section.

ZAGREB, February 3, 2019 - The leadership of the Croatian People's Party (HNS) on Saturday decided that this parliamentary party would run in the European Parliament elections, set for May, on its own and the slate will be headed by Matija Posavec, the prefect of the northern county of Međimurje.

Addressing the meeting of the HNS main committee, Posavec said that the current state of affairs in Croatia required a new approach to the politics, and the HNS slate for the EP elections would not include the incumbent party leadership.

The HNS list will consist of young members who have earned a good reputation working actively in their communities, he explained. Those will be candidates who have already made concrete decisions, while serving as officials in municipalities, towns or counties' authorities, for better living standards of their fellow citizens, Posavec said.

"I would like to offer to Croatia Međimurje's model of development which could be defined in a few words: a lot of hard work, a bounty of understanding and tolerance and no ideology."

Elections to the European Parliament are held every five years. The citizens of the EU member states elect their representatives to the European Parliament by direct public ballot.

In the coming weeks, the full slate of 12 HNS candidates will be presented.

More news on the European Parliament elections can be found in the Politics section.

ZAGREB, February 2, 2019 - The State Election Commission (DIP) has completed work on a single election law regulating, in one place, election institutes that are currently defined by different laws.

The single election bill also regulates all elections (presidential, parliamentary, European, local), except for those for ethnic minority representatives and ethnic minority councils, DIP deputy chair Vesna Fabijančić-Križanić said.

Fabijančić-Križanić cited some of the specific solutions in the bill, including one of preferential voting, which according to Public Administration Minister Lovro Kuščević is also to be introduced for local elections.

"The political will for that type of voting, with as many options as possible, is evident, and that is technically a fairly demanding mission," Fabijančić-Križanić said, noting that this reflected on the size of the ballot, which many colloquially call "blanket".

The DIP has proposed that the ballot be the size of an A4 paper sheet. Political parties taking part in elections would be listed in alphabetical order on the left side of the ballot, while on the right side there would be boxes where voters would enter the number or numbers of their preferred candidate(s).

The candidates' numbers would be copied from a booklet that would be available in every voting booth.

The other DIP deputy chair, Ana Lovrin, too, advocates this solution as practicable. She says that its practicability would be particularly evident in local elections, for which preferential voting is to be introduced as well, and where local assemblies sometimes have as many as 45 members.

The DIP has proposed that the ban on election candidacy be applied in the same way for all types of elections because currently it applies only to parliamentary and local elections, in which persons sentenced to a minimum six-month prison term (including conditional sentences) cannot run.

Under the bill proposed by the DIP, the Ethics Commission, which follows elections for the Croatian parliament and the European Parliament, would also monitor presidential elections.

Under the bill, voter committees would have the same number of members while now in some elections they have ten members and in presidential elections six.

The DIP has proposed that voter committees have eight members in all elections - a non-party president and their deputy, and three members each from the ruling and opposition parties.

The DIP also proposes harmonising the practice with regard to the entry into force of the decision on calling elections.

This is very important for the election process because election activities start on the day following the day when the decision entered into force, and in some cases that decision entered into force on the day of its adoption while in other cases it entered into force on the day of its publication in the Official Gazette, which caused technical problems in the implementation of elections.

The DIP proposes what it believes is the optimal solution for election participants and election bodies - that election activities start five days after the entry into force of the decision on calling elections.

It also proposes introducing penalties for violating the media blackout in all elections as such penalties are currently not envisaged for presidential elections.

The DIP has also developed an application to enable political actors to submit to it, by e-mail, their financial statements, regular or electoral, and it hopes they will start doing so as of this spring already.

Once the application comes to life, the DIP will publish all financial reports it receives on its website.

The bill, which has been sent to the Public Administration Ministry, is a solid basic document and when policy-makers decide to introduce changes, they will have good institutes for that in our bill, Fabijančić-Križanić and Lovrin said.

More news on the elections in Croatia can be found in the Politics section.

ZAGREB, January 27, 2019 - The former president of Croatia and leader of the non-parliamentary Forward Croatia party, Ivo Josipović, announced on Saturday that next week he would begin talks on merging his party with the Social Democratic Party (SDP).

Speaking in an interview with Croatian Radio, Josipović said that he was not entering into talks with the SDP to be the SDP's presidential candidate, adding that he would support former SDP leader and prime minister Zoran Milanović in the presidential race if he showed that he was able to defeat the incumbent Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović at the ballot box.

Josipović said that his talks on joining the Civic Liberal Alliance (GLAS) had ended in failure because that party wanted the new party to be predominantly liberal rather than social democratic, while the SDP had recognised the need for uniting leftist liberal opposition parties. He said he was certain that this process would continue and that talks would be launched with two more parties.

Josipović said that the moves made by SDP leader Davor Bernardić to unite similar centre-left parties were very good. "The mood in the SDP about my return is very positive, despite a few dissenting voices," he said, announcing that a majority of 1,100 members of his party would join the SDP.

Josipović resigned from the SDP after becoming President of Croatia early in 2010. Five years on, he ran for a second term in office but was defeated by the incumbent president Kolinda Grabar Kitarović, who was nominated by the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). He did not return to the SDP then, but instead formed the Forward Croatia party.

More news on political developments in Croatia can be found in the special section.

ZAGREB, January 19, 2019 - The Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) is not thinking about early parliamentary elections, as it believes that there is no need to waste money and time, however, the party is prepared for elections, the HDZ official and Parliament Deputy Speaker Željko Reiner said in Zagreb on Saturday.

"The HDZ is ready for elections anytime, particularly now when the HDZ approval ratings are two times higher than the first opposition party's ratings. However, we in the HDZ have not discussed an option of snap elections to date," said Reiner.

Commenting on the relationships among political parties making up a majority in the parliament, in the context of the announcement by Zagreb Mayor Milan Bandić that he will send a letter of intent to Prime Minister Andrej Plenković which would outline "joint priorities", Reiner said that that it was normal that coalition partners talked with each other.

Reiner ruled out the media interpretations that Bandić was trying to make his support to the government conditional to the government's acceptance of his demands. "I can't see any form of blackmailing. It is normal that coalition partners talk with each other. We hold meetings on a regular basis almost each week and discuss all important matters," Reiner said.

Announcing the letter of intent, Bandić recently cited the Immunology Institute, a children's hospital, 60 low-floor trams, tram connection to Zagreb Airport and the Zagreb on the Sava River project as the future joint priorities.

We have many proposals for the government, and the City of Zagreb is going in the coming days to forward a letter of intent to Prime Minister Plenković, Bandić said adding that five priorities would be defined for the purpose of the improvement of the city's economy and transport.

As for the five demands which the Zagreb mayor forwarded to the government, Parliament Speaker Gordan Jandroković of the HDZ on Friday said he had not seen them. "We won't agree to any blackmail. Those who blackmail can't be part of the ruling coalition. If there is any blackmail, we will go to an early election," Jandroković said when asked by the press about Bandić's demands.

More news on the HDZ can be found in the Politics section.

ZAGREB, January 17, 2019 - The presidents of GLAS, the Istrian Democratic Party (IDS), the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS) and the Primorje-Gorski Kotar Alliance (PGS) signed an agreement in Rijeka on Thursday on the PGS joining the Amsterdam Coalition.

PGS president Darijo Vasilić said what he and the others had in common was the fight for regional values, an open, modern and civil society and a civilised Croatia as well as against the growing radical right and increasingly strong populism in politics.

IDS president Boris Miletić said opinion polls showed that Amsterdam Coalition had become the strongest opposition force in Croatia. "We want an open and progressive Croatia, where people aren't afraid and emigrating, where work and enterprise are encouraged, not blocked."

GLAS president Anka Mrak Taritaš said the Croatian Pensioners Party (HSU) would join the coalition by the end of the month.

The Amsterdam Coalition firmly believes that it is necessary to oppose content- and idea-free radicalism and populism, and pushes for a new Europe and Croatia in it. We stand for liberal democracy and man's right to choose, work and live in a functioning country, she said.

She said the coalition would run for the European Parliament and that its candidates would be capable of representing Croatia's interests.

HSS president Krešo Beljak said the coalition's approval ratings would be even better once the HSU joined them.

More news on the Amsterdam Coalition can be found in the Politics section.

About a year ahead of the presidential elections, which are supposed to take place in December or January, we have the first major poll of the year of the potential candidates. The Promocija Plus agency conducted a survey for RTL, reports RTL on January 11, 2019.

If the elections were held now, the winner would be decided in the second round. The best chances for a win has the current president, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, who is expected to run for the second term.

Although she will not announce her decision before spring, as much as 38 per cent of respondents would vote for her in the first round. However, in recent months, after changes among some of her advisers which were not welcomed by voters on the extreme right, she did lose about three per cent of the support.

The second best-candidate is former SDP leader and former Prime Minister Zoran Milanović with almost 18%. He has not yet decided whether or not he will run for the presidency, and the current president has more than two times more support than him.

The former chairwoman of the Conflict of Interest Commission Dalija Orešković, who has never run for a political office, is third with 12 per cent of support, followed by president of the Živi Zid party, Ivan Sinčić, who has lost some support and is now at 7.9 %.

The leader of MOST, Božo Petrov, has also not ruled out the possibility of running, but his support is just 6.2 per cent. In 2010, Zagreb Mayor Milan Bandić managed to enter the second round of presidential elections, which he lost against SDP’s Ivo Josipović, and there are strong rumours that he might run again. However, this poll gives him just 4.5% of support.

Bruna Esih, a possible candidate of the right-wing parties, which are unhappy with the latest moves by the current president, has no real chance. She gets just over four per cent. Former MOST member Marko Vučetić is under two per cent, and he is the only candidate who has said he would run for the presidency.

Just as in all elections since 2000, the winner would be decided in the second round of voting. The current president is heavily favoured to win. Although her support has declined compared to December, Grabar-Kitarović would easily defeat Milanović. She is at 54.6 per cent, while Milanović is at 37.9 per cent. Although this is still significant support for Milanović since he has not been involved in politics for several years, there is no real reason to expect that the campaign and being in the media focus would increase his popularity. On the contrary.

The following months will tell whether the decline of the current president is just a short-term correction or the start of a negative trend. The president used to increase her popularity by attacking the government periodically, but the question is whether she will be able to continue doing that, given that it is likely that HDZ will support her as a candidate.

More news on the presidential elections can be found in our Politics section.

Translated from RTL (reported by Damira Gregoret).