Croatia’s Would-be Presidents Fight for Tudjman’s Mantle

The three leading candidates in Croatia's late-December presidential election have not yet confronted each other directly, for example in TV debates - but are meanwhile quarreling bitterly through the media and social networks on who is the rightful heir to former president Franjo Tudjman - who died 20 years ago on Tuesday.

The incumbent, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, who is backed by his old party, the ruling centre-right Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ - and the folk singer Miroslav Skoro, an independent candidate supported by various right-wing parties and personalities - both claim that they are the only true successors to the first president of independent Croatia.

Political analyst Zarko Puhovski said they were trying to legitimize themselves by invoking the memory of Tudjman, because since his death he had been transformed "from a historical person to a myth" as a result of his formative role in the creation of the modern Croatian state.

He recalled that even many of those who in the 1990s strongly opposed Tudjman now felt obliged to pay tribute to him. "For most of the right wing, but also for some of the people on the other side, Tudjman [means] greatness," Puhovski told BIRN.

On Sunday, at a big rally in the capital, Zagreb, Skoro declared that he would be the next president of Croatia, and would resume and inherit Tudjman's policy, claiming that "today's HDZ has nothing to do with the [HDZ] from the time of the first Croatian president".

That claim angered the incumbent President and other HDZ members, who claim they are the only heirs to Tudjman. "Today's HDZ is firmly on the path outlined by Tudjman," Grabar-Kitarovic said on Tuesday while visiting Veliko Trgovisce, Tudjman's birthplace.

Even the Social Democratic...