Croatian Democratic Union

Then a parliamentary session will be convened to confirm the election of new ministers.

As a result of his involvement, Croatia tried to pass a law that tried to protect former Yugoslav secret service agents from extradition to Germany to stand trial. As in many other things, he was unsuccessful.

Contradictory Messages

The HDZ and its sister party in Bosnia and Herzegovina have long advocated ethnically 'federalising' Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is in line with the HDZ's embrace of convicted war criminals who took part in a joint effort to carve up the country with Bosnian Serb separatists during the 1992-95 war.

The former manager of the Croatian national football team, Miroslav Ciro Blazevic, has surprised and shocked many in Croatia by appearing in a video made for the European elections by the Independent Democratic Serbian Party, SDSS, a party representing Croatia's Serbian minority.

Blazevic, who is a member of Croatia's HDZ party, did this when party SDSS leader Milorad Pupovac asked him to join the SDSS campaign for the European Parliament elections. The ad is yet to air.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the top candidate of the centrist European People's Party, EPP, for the post of European Commission President, Manfred Weber, will participate in the central election conference of the ruling Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, on Saturday in Zagreb.

Plenkovic has developed a strategy of silence on many of the scandals that have embroiled his own ministers and party colleagues, to good effect, Mamic said.

"If you look at his position, this is effective and efficient communication," she said. "He gives short answers, because obviously the outcome of all these cases could go in any direction."

Zagreb County Court on Monday convicted former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader of war profiteering for accepting an unlawful payment of 3.6 million kunas (around 485,000 euros) during talks between Austria's Hypo Bank and the Croatian government.

The talks took place during the war, between late 1994 and March 1995, when Sanader was Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.

MPs in the entity parliament in Bosnia's Bosniak- and Croat-dominated Federation could vote in the coming weeks on a new draft electoral law put forward by five political parties - aimed at averting the possibility of general elections going ahead in October without a legal mechanism to elect the Federation parliament's upper chamber.