ABSTAINERS ELECTED TUDJMAN

AIM Zagreb, 16 June, 1997

On Sunday Dr Franjo Tudjman was given the right to rule Croatia for another five years, because already in the first round he defeated in a landslide his counter-candidates

• the Social Democrat Dr Zdravko Tomac and the Liberal Vlado Gotovac, who was supported by another eight major and minor parties. Tudjman won about 62, Tomac 21, and Gotovac 17 per cent of the votes. Final results will not be known until the end of the week, because for the first time it was possible to vote in presidential elections all around the world, or more precisely in 42 countries which permitted their inhabitants who have Croatian citizenship, but not a permanent place of residence in Croatia, to vote on their territories. According to official data, there were 377,705 such registered voters, but only slightly less than a hundred thousand of them practised their right to vote, out of which 48 thousand in Bosnia & Herzegovina, so it is clear that it was not "Croatian emigration" that decided the winner, but just contributed to making Tudjman's triumph so great. The opposiiton did not even succeed in the intention to force Tudjman into the second round of the elections, and Tudjman registered a better result than five years ago when he won 56.73 per cent of the votes.

This time, Tudjman's greatest helpers were fear, corruption and poverty, lethargy, apathy, weakness of the opposition and its candidates, but also the yet unseen terror of the media, almost complete lack of an election campaign the merit for which primarily goes to Croatian television, which altogether caused enormous abstention of over 40 per cent of the voters. Immediately after publication of the initial results Tudjman organized a big celebration with the yet unseen fireworks, more luxurious even than on the Day of the State, having laconically and triumphantly declared that everything was in accordance with expectations, but that he hoped that the victory would be even greater. And he was not mistaken: as new results continued to arrive, the percentage of votes he had won continued to grow and that of his opponents to drop. As during the entire campaign, he promised nothing to the voters, except continuity of the HDZ policy, if that can be considered to be a promise.

The key issue after these elections is - why did over 40 per cent of potential voters decide to remain at home or go on a picnic instead to go to the polls? However hard officials of the HDZ, and even president of the State Election Committee, Ivan Mrkonjic, himself may try to prove that this is customary in European countries, such proportions of abstention is highly indicative. It is a warning to Tudjman himself, who will at the utmost get about 1,350,000 votes which is by 170 thousand less than in 1992. Five years ago Tudjman won support of 42.4 per cent of the total electorate, and now only 33.2 per cent. According to experience, Tudjman will not be much concerned because of it, and he will again speak about a "glorious victory", because after all, the entire tactics of HDZ election headquarters was founded on the attempt to make the elections seems insignificant, a mere formality, with a pronounced message: voters, it is all the same to you anyway, because everything has already been decided. The HDZ has completely succeeded in it with the help of the media, especially television, aware that it can always count on its unwavering electorate, which has this time nevertheless been considerably less numerous. In these presidential elections, the HDZ has so far won the least number of votes, but the election results are almost identical with those anticipated on the basis of a public opinion poll ordered by the HDZ and made by the Institute for Applied Social Investigation, which the Croats were informed about as an accomplished fact on Friday, two days before the elections.

But, the HDZ has not done it all, the opposition has greatly helped it, because while Tudjman was offering continuity, Tomac advocated redefinition of the state with a stress on social policy, and Gotovac was in favour of a most radical variant of changes. The voters were simply confused, because it was simply impossible to say who represented the left, who the right, and who was in the centre, so the pronounced social insecurity did its bit. After publication of the results, Tomac will be satisfied with his percentage of votes, because it is by far the most the Social Democratic Party (SDP) has ever won and it shows a constant rise of popularity of reformed communists (in relation to the April elections by six whole per cent). At the same time, Tomac proved that he was more popular than his party, which will quite certainly affect the relations within the SDP. Commenting on the results of the elections, Tomac stated that people should finally realize that problems could be resolved by voting in a democracy. Those who are discontented will not dare complain any more because these elections had offered them an opportunity to change things, but they have not used it. Vlado Gotovac, evidently disappointed, presented a thesis that only voters of the HDZ and the SDP were disciplined, and that the others have given everything up as a bad job.

And while the opinion of Tomac can be said to be realistic, except that he might be too strict when he criticizes those who have remained at home, Gotovac is simply forgetting what results achieved by his party were at the recent and earlier elections, and that the Liberals are constantly losing voters. He is forgetting that by entering the coalition with the Croat Peasants' Party and rejecting Racan's Social Democrats, he is the one who is responsible for the debacle in the elections for the Chamber of Districts. He is forgetting that the voters wish to give their votes neither to him, nor to the Croat National Party, because it proved to be a futile job: as soon as they are elected, deputies or representatives of these parties simply go over to the HDZ. The most drastic examples are those of Zagreb and the district of Rijeka where public offices were not distributed the way the citizens had wanted.

Realistically speaking, neither Tomac nor Gotovac are men who could have seriously opposed Tudjman at this moment, but unfortunately it seems that on the political scene of Croatia there is no politician who could seriously endanger the Croatian leader. Gotovac is right about one thing: these elections have shown that there is no political centre in Croatia, that it has not been established yet as a serious political force, and that the SDP is definitely becoming the only significant opposition party. These elections have also shown that the greatest opposition to the HDZ are the people themselves, because the fact that 40 per cent of them did not wish to spend five minutes of their time for it is a specific protest againt Croatia such as it is. In a specific way the Croats have manifested what they think about the current authorities, although it is questionable whether such a sharp division between the right and the left will lead to a major conflict. This question is especially significant when one knows that abstention was the greatest in cities and that Tudjman is in fact the president of the rural, uneducated, uninformed, conservative and rightist Croatia.

This does not concern Tudjman, because the only important thing for him is that he had got the mandate to lead Croatia into the twenty first century. Many will say that because of his illness this is not quite true, but that this great victory was a gift to him like the last anointment. One thing is for sure: while he is alive, he will not change his policy and he will remain known in history as the most successful Croatian politician from the turn of the twentieth century to the middle ages into which he is so successfully pushing his country. That is why a commentary of the past presidential elections is that everything is as expected and programmed. The Croats can do nothing but wait for another opportunity, if not earlier then in 1999, when they will vote the new Chamber of representatives of the Assembly.

GOJKO MARINKOVIC (AIM)