Croatia: Covid Pandemic Keeps The Nation Divided

This Christmas is the second in a row since the Covid’19n pandemic was announced and I wish you all a blessed Christmas and a happy New Year with the hope that we all get at least a little bit of the warmth of togetherness of family and friendship love during the season.  

Now, well into the end of the second year since the World Health Organisation declared that the Covid-19 outbreak in China had become a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) (January 2020), the Coronavirus pandemic continues to disrupt the planet with multiple uncertainties, just as it disrupts Croatia. It has been a turbulent and uncertain journey with new variants emerging to seemingly unexpected new outbreaks raging, and multiple new vaccines developed, but their delivery uneven. Uneven because vaccine supplies were as such and uneven because the pro- and anti-vaccination and pandemic measures surges exploded like hurricanes, bringing third, fourth and now fifth waves of the pandemic…impoverishing many families both spiritually and economically.

Covid-19 vaccines have been increasingly looked to as the holy grail to provide the most promising efficient and effective means of putting the pandemic behind us—especially given the lack of effective treatment against the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Whichever way one looks at it from the perspective of numbers of well-educated, well-armed scientists the science across the world is clear: Covid-19 vaccines are a safe and effective way to prevent serious illness, hospitalisation and death from the coronavirus, and vaccine mandates, particularly around employment and travel, are considered by governments an effective tool in promoting widespread vaccinations. Vaccine mandates have led to the emergence of vaccine nationalism whereby the governments introduce control measures that often rub many people wrongly and, hence, vicious disagreements with these measures develop. Croatia is a relatively small country of around 4 million people, but it is experiencing high rates of deaths from or with Covid; the number of these deaths will surpass 12,000 by the beginning of next week. And that is huge for a relatively small country.

 Clearly, the traditional nationalistic reaction was in fact common to all countries as soon as it became necessary to create public response policies to the pandemic, even if this was done with varying degrees of modesty and countries differed in the “severity” of measures and restrictions vis-à-vis the traditional freedom of movement rights people consider as entitlement. The Covid-19 crisis caused nationalistic practices to erupt almost everywhere: “wars” over masks, tests, vaccines, travel, vaccination certificates. All over the world, national withdrawal was proposed as an emergency solution, triggering the closure of borders at rates and in ways that were specific to individual nations, even when they belonged to the Schengen area of the EU.

Perhaps because it is a relatively small country Croatia’s divided population of the perceived benefits of vaccination, on the usefulness of control measures that are meant to stop or minimise the spread of infections are more visible and felt than in a bigger country. This often leaves the impression that the public mood in Croatia is largely that of bitterness and anger, which are often displaced and thus lead to lack of vision or confidence for the future.

Those looking at rejecting the government measures and lobbying against vaccination have in Croatia, as elsewhere in the world, adopted a warlike nationalistic narrative that can often, on individual bases, emerge as cruel insults to persons who hold differing views regarding Covid measures, in particular.  This aspect of public reactions to the pandemic evidently has to do with some ideological incarnations of contemporary nationalism and points to the national-populist variant that has little to do with the original nationalism, which emancipated from absolutism and imperial, colonial, or totalitarian regime control. Whatever it may be, this national-populist approach in Croatia is more likely than not responsible for a poor picture of health in Croatia when that health is measured by the number of people receiving Covid-19 vaccination. As in many countries across the world the social media in and from Croatia is riddled with anti-vaccination related messages, information and misinformation, and personal vicious attacks and insults against those who think differently.  Levels of vaccination are alarmingly low in Croatia; nationally about 51% of adult population is fully vaccinated at this stage.

It is becoming more and more apparent that in Croatia those standing against vaccination and against various measures such as vaccine mandates are concentrated among the various political parties in opposition, particularly those leaning to the conservative or right-winged patriotic political orientation, e.g., Croatian Sovereignists (Hrvatski suverenisti), Patriotic Movement (Domovinski pokret), various Croatian Party of Rights echelons (Hrvatska stranka prava), BRIDGE/MOST etc. Hence the opinions regarding Covid -19 pandemic, and its management have in Croatia become a political tool that evidently seeks nothing more except gaining favour among and winning votes from them at the next parliamentary elections. It is in my view most sad that all these political parties in the government opposition while protesting against government’s handling of the pandemic fail to explain how they would control the spread of the virus if they won government.

The determination to hold onto a particular opinion in Croatia among political parties can best be seen from incidents that occurred last week when a well-known politician, Member of Parliament for the Croatian Sovereignists, Hrvoje Zekanovic, openly accused the right-wing and other unvaccinated politicians (who are against vaccination) of being guilty of spreading the infection and sending people to hospitals.

“You are responsible – people are not vaccinated because of you. You speak against covid vaccine certificates. Vaccination should not be treated as a footnote. I wonder how those who visit prayer communities and pilgrims will confess, explain why someone on a respirator suffers and only because they trusted Facebook more than common sense,” Zekanovic said in the Croatian Parliament on 9 December 2021.

For these words Zekanovic is being ousted from the political party Croatian Sovereigninsts where he was a leader and indeed a most significant founder. He is apparently being accused of having spoken against the party lines and views on Covid-19 vaccination and measures to do with the pandemic control. And this comes from the political party whose senior members have often expressed criticism against people who follow the government’s advice for vaccination! Croatian Sovereignists have through this case proven that they do not stand for the independence and sovereignty they preach. If they did then they would not act so viciously against Mr Zekanovic. After all. Every political party that seeks to win elections must be seen to support both sides of the Covid-19 war – those for and those against vaccination and measures because the voters themselves, the public for whom the country exists is made up of people on both sides of the argument.   

Furthermore, one shudders in disgust at the raft of individual insults and awfully cruel comments about Zekanovic that have filled the social media. Just because he expressed his personal view regarding pro-Covid-19 vaccination!  I reckon that no decent human being could bear even thinking about let alone express such hatred and ridicule against another human being and fellow citizen.

From the above incidents it has become blatantly clearer than ever before that Croatia is bitterly divided onto two camps. Quashing the pandemic with a majority consensus in one or the other approach is looking more and more unlikely by the day.  

A comical thing one comes across in Croatia these days is that the pro-vaccination people are labelled globalist and blind followers of an ideology as if the anti-vaccination people are also not following a global movement against vaccination and pandemic measures, which also, if one likes, forms an ideology!   The pro and anti-vax movements, like many other issues that have emerged during the pandemic, serves as a stark reminder that our society’s public sphere is fundamentally broken. The long yet essential process of fixing it will require all of us, as responsible citizens, and media users, to work collaboratively on restoring public conversation mechanisms. But while you have politicians that are blind to one side of the argument coming from the people and not to the other, while there is no conversation between the two sides, while insults and vitriolic exchanges continue between the two sides, the politics of selfish pursuit of positions or bums on chairs in parliament will surely continue at the very detriment of the nation and, perhaps, towards a more physical conflict. Ina Vukic  

Croatia – Election Results In Capital Zagreb Crucial For Continued Affirmation Of Harshly Won Sovereignty

30th May is Croatian Statehood Day! The date that marked in 1990 the inauguration of the Croatian Parliament as we know it today, the guardian as it were of a sovereign Croatia.

Happy Croatian Statehood Day!

In 2021 it is also the day when the Second round of local elections will be held. If the new left green We Can (Možemo) coalition wins lead positions in the Capital of Zagreb local government it will also signal an attack (either by large or small voter turnout) on Croatia’s sovereignty away from communist Yugoslavia.    

People in Croatia during the last 15 years, at least, have been crying out for change! Change in political leadership that would bring about a solidification of values fought for during the 1990’s Homeland War, when almost 94% of Croatian voters said a big YES to secession from communism and Yugoslavia. Whichever way one turned it seemed the popular consensus was that Croatia needs to rid itself of HDZ/Croatian Democratic Union and SDP/Social Democratic Party as leading political parties because their governments since year 2000 had increasingly failed to modernise laws in order to move away from former communist practices, increasingly failed to cut corruption and nepotism, increasingly failed to usher in investment and development that would battle alarming unemployment and brain drain away from the country… Yet voter turnout had consistently been low for this change to actually occur.  

Today, in 2021, Croatia still lives in an era of unprecedented income inequality, unnatural political elitism, corruption, non-responsive legislation to the evident needs, and skyrocketing childhood poverty just as it did under the communist/socialist regime in former Yugoslavia. In 2019 and according to the research of the Institute of Economics [“Child Poverty and Strategies for Coping with Household Poverty in Croatia”] almost 300,000 children in Croatia lived in poverty, often without basic necessities. The situation is not better today and that is an unacceptable number of children living in poverty; in a country of just over 4 million people those numbers are debilitating and devastating. The 2019 survey cited another devastating statistic: one in five members of poor families said at least one member of the household had gone to bed hungry in the month prior to the survey.

No doubt, financial insecurity increases someone’s odds of poor psychological and physical well-being. And so, one must wonder if many voters in Zagreb who have at the first round of local elections on 16 May 2021 voted significantly for the new ultra-left green hybrid of communism and socialism under the name “We Can” (Možemo) into the Council Assembly are actually still walking the communist Yugoslavia tightrope of wilful self-deception, being a Pollyanna, who only wears rose-tinted glasses and pretends the glass is half-full when it’s really not! The We Can voters as those activists involved in this political platform have certainly not learned the lesson of sustainable good life and that is: without hard work and productivity there can be no permanent exit from poverty and financial insecurity. They say they will get rid of corruption, yet corrupt and non-transparent ways define their funded activist histories! Their employment or productivity history reads activist, paid activist, NGO activist with no services provision but lots of pro-communist political claptrap, LGBTQIA intrusive pressure against mainstream Christian family values (whether you want the pressure or not) … evidently carrying the badge of approval of the communism coined phrases “State-led Corruption” and “State-led Mass Murder”!

These We Can political activists are really of the same breed as the major political parties like HDZ and SDP, who have held government both nationally and locally. The fact that they brandish the symbols and insignia of the former communist Yugoslavia as something to be celebrated, even though it murdered in cold blood at least one million of innocent people, even though the EU has branded it as criminal totalitarian regime – tells you everything about them even though the tattoo “democracy” is “embedded” upon their foreheads.  

As to how much this new left hybrid of unwelcome communism and socialism that’s hiding under “We Can” name will rock Croatia’s political and economic stability in the coming four years will be seen on this coming Sunday 30th May when the 2nd Round of local elections will confirm the leading positions of Mayor, Deputy Mayor and County Governors. What happens in the Capital city of a country is usually the guiding rule as to what political mood will spread throughout the country in the coming four years. Should the We Can Tomislav Tomasevic win the Mayoral seat of Zagreb instead of Miroslav Skoro of the Homeland Movement party, for instance, Croatia should also brace itself for some serious reckoning on the streets directed against the communist past being kept alive in Croatia.

The fact that a portion of Croatia’s voters may be realigning to the Left after the Social Democrats have lost much footing on the ground in past couple of years is not so much of a concern, given the Left has always been there, but what is of grave concern is the fact that with this new Left (under We Can brand) comes a mad and brazen attempt at reaffirmation of values of communist regime of former Yugoslavia against which 94% voted in 1991! It would be communism and socialism creeping back into the Capital City, walking without recognition or respect over the dead bodies and bones of thousands upon thousands who sacrificed their lives to rid Croatia of that political and social plague in the 1990’s. I shudder at this possibility.

In local elections held in 576 local and regional government bodies in Croatia on Sunday, May 16, in 70 cities, the heads were elected in the first round of voting. Of these, the HDZ won 36 mayorships and the major opposition party, the Social Democratic Party of Croatia (SDP), managed only 13. Of the six counties that elected prefects in the first round, HDZ secured four. Other counties and cities will have runoffs on May 30 to elect their mayors and prefects.

In three major cities, the incumbent HDZ failed to achieve major breakthroughs. In Zagreb, Tomislav Tomasevic, leader of Mozemo! (We can!) from the green-left coalition, secured 45.15% votes while his nearest rival Miroslav Skoro, leader of the right-wing Homeland Movement, won 12.6% votes. In the 47-seat Zagreb City Assembly, the green-left We Can coalition won 23 seats, falling one seat short of simple majority.

In Split, the second largest city in Croatia, Ivica Puljak from the liberal Centre party won 26.82% votes and will take on Vice Mihanović from the HDZ (23.23% votes) in the second round on 30 May. In Rijeka, the third largest city and a traditional SDP stronghold, Marko Filipović from the SDP (30.25%) will take on independent centre-right candidate Davor Stimac (16.10%) in the second round.

Local elections in Croatia as elsewhere in Europe, are considered a second-order election and not so important for the national agenda. They are called as such because regularly they attracted less interest, as well as lower voter turnout, and are perceived less crucial than parliamentary and presidential elections, which form a national constellation of political relations. However, one must heed a warning that local elections in Croatia are quite pivotal because, for example, many political parties do not possess the same amount of strength or public recognition at the national level, when compared to local politics. Such parties invest all of their efforts in building local-level networks that include not only politicians but entrepreneurs and interest groups, which subsequently helps them in pushing forward with their national-level policies. This is particularly important in the atmosphere where state-controlled mainstream media outlets is very biased and discriminates against political candidates. Local elections are also significant due to the fact that decision-makers on the local level can, at the same time, perform duties on the national level. For example, one who holds a position of city mayor or county governor, can be elected to legislative body on the national level, that is, the Croatian Parliament. Therefore, this local election race is quite significant as it will showcase the strength of two of the major political parties HDZ and SDP) as well as the strength of the emerging political forces that seem to be seen as filling the “third option” shoes in the country. At this moment the two competing for these shoes are the ultra-leftist and green We Can and the right-wing Homeland Movement led by Miroslav Skoro. Whichever wins the top position for Zagreb will signal the way that the political climate is likely to move in the immediate future. If Tomasevic wins nostalgia towards the criminal communist regime of Yugoslavia is likely to grow causing major unrests on the streets and beyond. If Skoro wins a stronger orientation towards business and new job development and a deserved strengthening of Homeland War values. The later would be what Croatia needs and must have in order to become politically and economically stable. Ina Vukic

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