This story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.net/en/.
   License: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/
   international.
   --------------------------------------------------------------


Ambitious contenders from Croatia’s Left: Možemo wins Zagreb
By:   []
Date: None

On 30 May, in a landslide victory, Tomislav Tomašević, the candidate of a recently formed Green-Left coalition was elected the mayor of Croatia’s capital, Zagreb.

This, an astounding victory in the capital of a country where the centre-Right Croatian National Union (HDZ) seemed to have consolidated its political dominance, attracted the interest of the press and political commentators worldwide.

Tomašević, who ran under the Možemo (‘We Can!’) coalition, won 199,630 votes (67.3%) in the second round of the mayoral elections, while his chief rival, nationalist conservative Miroslav Škoro, garnered 106,300 votes (32.7%).

What were the deeper reasons behind the success of the Možemo candidate in Zagreb and the party’s increasing popularity as a whole? And what are the broader and longer-term implications?

Organisational infrastructure

Možemo was officially launched on 10 February 2019. The party declared its commitment to the political values of egalitarianism (social solidarity and gender equality), as well as environmentalism and the use of renewable sources of energy.

In the party’s founding principles, the leadership of Možemo define themselves as: “people who dedicated their lives to the social and common interest – for a better education, public health, justice, culture, workers’ and human rights”. Možemo was initially set up as a horizontally arranged and ‘devolved’ coalition of political forces, along the lines of early Podemos in Spain.

The founding assembly has decreed that the party is not run by an official president, but instead has two coordinators and functions under a collective leadership. Alongside the two coordinators (Sandra Benčić and Teodor Celakoski), Možemo has succeeded in hosting under its wings a wide network of social scientists and other Zagreb-based academics, political activists, artists and opinion formers originating from Croatia’s broader Left (Danijela Dolenec, Urša Raukar, Tomislav Tomašević, Mima Simić, and Dario Juričan – to name but a few).

Beyond the Left

At first, this multifaceted arrangement enabled the party to concretize its political programme and reach out to a wide range of social segments and interest groups. In the longer run, this strategy has enabled Možemo to extend its appeal beyond the left-leaning circles of Zagreb-based academia and intelligentsia. Although formally affiliated with the Greens/Europe Free Alliance group in the European Parliament, the party has also succeeded in gaining the endorsement of prominent figures among the European radical Left (including Yanis Varoufakis and the MeRA25 initiative). As result of its ambitious and successful engagement, Možemo entered the Sabor (National Assembly) with seven seats following the parliamentary elections of 5 July 2020.

Euro-alternativism

By contrast to the inadequate elaboration of socioeconomic issues by the (centre-Left) Social Democratic Party/SDP, the economic programme of Možemo consists in an anti-austerity core that criticises socioeconomic pathologies such as: the increase in youth unemployment and the ensuing brain-drain; the intensification of regional disparities between the more (e.g. Greater Zagreb, Zagorje, and Istria) and the less developed (e.g. several districts in eastern Slavonia and the Dalmatian hinterland) parts of the country; the deterioration of living standards especially for the social layers that were most heavily affected by the six-year recession from 2009 to 2015 and the ensuing introduction of austerity measures.

Throughout its campaign, since 2019, Možemo has not faced serious competition from smaller actors with an anti-austerity profile. The erstwhile increasingly popular party of Živi Zid/Human Shield, suffered a steady decline in its public appeal after one of the founding members seceded and set up the Party of Ivan Pernar in July 2019. By contrast to Živi Zid’s vocal and almost rejectionist Euroscepticism, Možemo counter-proposed the refashioning of European integration with a greater emphasis on social cohesion and equality.

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/ambitious-contenders-from-croatias-left-mo%C5%BEemo-wins-zagreb/