Milanovic Won Croatian Presidency on “Protest” Votes, Expert Says

A Croatian political expert said Sunday's presidential election victory by the centre-left candidate, Zoran Milanovic, was to some extent a protest vote against his rival's "hard-core nationalist campaign".

Milanovic took 52.67 per cent of the votes, comfortably beating the centre-right incumbent, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, who won 47.33 per cent. Milanovic won 104,901 more votes than Grabar-Kitarovic.

"A large number of voters voted for Milanovic in protest … against Grabar-Kitarovic's kind of [nationalist] campaign," political analyst Davor Gjenero told BIRN on Monday.

"She led a hard-right and hard-core nationalist campaign in which she even allowed herself to have the support of a person convicted of air piracy … The electorate simply penalized such a campaign," Gjenero continued.

He was referring to the controversial endorsement of Grabar-Kitarovic by Julienne Busic, the American wife of Zvonko Busic, who in 1976 hijacked a passenger flight from New York to Chicago to draw attention to Croatian demands for independence from Yugoslavia. Both husband and wife were later jailed in the US.

While Milanovic celebrated his victory on Sunday night in front of a crowd of delighted supporters and members of his Social Democratic Party, SDP, the mood at the election headquarters of the governing Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, which had backed Grabar-Kitarovic, was obviously subdued.

Gjenero said that the "biggest loser of this election is the right wing of the HDZ", which had been in charge of the campaign and had intended to use Grabar-Kitarovic's victory to attack the moderate HDZ leader and Prime Minister, Andrej Plenkovic - long a target of the right wing of the party.

"With the defeat of Grabar-Kitarovic, for which the...