(Bloomberg) -- Croatians shot down President Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic’s bid for a second term, electing the prime minister who led the nation into the European Union to rebalance politics in the bloc’s newest member.
Zoran Milanovic, who ran the Adriatic state’s government from 2011 to 2015, won 54% of votes in Sunday’s presidential runoff, according to partial results with 71% counted. Kitarovic, a former NATO executive whose popularity unexpectedly plummeted in the last weeks of the campaign after she was tied to the scandal-plagued mayor of Zagreb, got 46%.
Kitarovic’s defeat could spell trouble for her ally Andrej Plenkovic, the current prime minister, before general elections in the fall and just after his government took over the EU’s rotating presidency. While she reached out to voters embracing anti-immigrant positions seen in fellow EU states Poland and Hungary, Milanovic vowed to reject extremism, fight graft, and stop the outflow of young people who have left Croatia to seek better lives in western Europe.
“I will fight against the plague that’s consuming Croatia, and that’s corruption and conflicts of interest,” Milanovic said in a televised debate with Kitarovic before the vote. “We can overturn demographic trends and keep our young people here only with a decent, honest government.”
While the president’s role is largely ceremonial, the office commands the armed forces and decides over foreign-policy appointments with the premier. It also provides a political platform and Milanovic’s opposition-leading Social Democratic party is looking for any edge it can get over Plenkovic’s conservative Croatian Democratic Union.
“The result is a big blow to right-wing voters,” said Nenad Zakosek, political science professor at the University of Zagreb.
Parliament Vote
The rivals also differed on who the nation’s biggest ally is. While Kitarovic said it was the U.S., and touted when she met President Donald Trump, Milanovic said Croatia depended most on ties with the EU.
But the main issue before the presidential vote was corruption, and Kitarovic’s campaign suffered after she was filmed singing Happy Birthday and giving a cake to Zagreb Mayor Milan Bandic. He’s fighting graft accusations over the granting of preferential access to stalls at Zagreb’s Christmas market.
The accusations, which Bandic denies, come at a sensitive time for former Yugoslav republic of 4.2 million, which joined the EU in 2013 and took over the EU’s six-month rotating presidency on Jan. 1. During the term, it will organize meetings that may decide important issues including Brexit and the bloc’s next seven-year budget.
The bloc is scrutinizing Croatia’s readiness to adopt the euro and join Schengen, the EU’s passport-free travel zone. Graft concerns delayed similar efforts in nearby Bulgaria, adding pressure to Croatia, which is ranked fifth-worst in the EU by Transparency International.
“Milanovic’s victory means all bets are off now for parliamentary election in the fall,” said Zarko Puhovski from the University of Zagreb. “For the rest of the year we will have an unclear picture of where the real power in the country is situated.”
(Updates with partial results in second paragraph, quote in sixth.)