Zarko Puhovski

"Gentlemen, I want to talk a little bit more about [our] promotional focus, given the advantages gained from Storm," Tudjman said as he opened the session.

Young green-left candidate Tomislav Tomasevic, leader of the Mozemo! (We Can!) party, came out on top in the local election run-off on Sunday in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, winning the most votes in the history of mayoral races in the city.

A young left-wing mayoral candidate, Tomislav Tomasevic, leader of the "Mozemo!" [We can!] party, came first by a big margin in Sunday's local elections in the capital, Zagreb.

Marcelic noted that Croatia has already seen a drop in employment and in the economy. "An additional problem is inconsistent crisis management that certainly creates dissatisfaction [among people]," he said.

Croatian political experts said the results of Sunday's first round of presidential elections in were predictable and in line with surveys conducted before the election.

"What happened was what we expected and what I predicted," political analyst Zarko Puhovski told BIRN on Monday.

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.

Amid an ongoing crisis in the ruling coalition in Croatia, with the junior coalition partner, the Croatian People's Party, HNS, threatening the senior Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, that it will vote against the draft budget for 2020, speculation grows about about the coalition collapsing.

After war veterans called for a boycott of Serbian singers at a music festival in Croatia's capital, Zagreb, a leading analyst said that such hard-liners had become more important than they should be in Croatian society.

Media criticism of the nationalist flavour of Croatia's World Cup celebrations has angered right-wing fans - who have compiled a list of journalists that are reporting «negatively» about Croatia and are supposedly staining its reputation.

The black list of allegedly unpatriotic reporters has circulated on social networks and right-wing websites.

As the Croatian government prepares to spend more on 1990s war veterans, as well as purchasing 12 military jets and covering debts in the health sector, it risks increasing the country's budget deficit, experts warned.