Zagreb Crisis

The Zagreb crisis (Croatian: Zagrebačka kriza) is the name used to describe a political crisis that followed the elections for the City of Zagreb local assembly held in October 1995. During the crisis the winning parties were unable to appoint their candidate for Mayor of Zagreb because the President of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman, refused to provide the formal confirmation of their decision.

A centre-left coalition of winning parties continued to hold majority in the local assembly during the crisis and continued to suggest other candidates, but they were all eventually turned down by the President as Croatian law at the time required a formal Presidential confirmation of the appointment. Meanwhile, the city was run by the government-appointed acting mayor, which meant that the city de facto had two parallel administrations. The situation led to several huge protests and was not resolved until the next local elections in April 1997, after which two opposition members of the assembly switched to Tuđman's Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party. This meant that HDZ finally succeeded in gaining the majority in the 50-seat assembly, which enabled the party to appoint their mayor, who was afterwards approved by Tuđman.

The crisis had its origin in the factional struggle within the ruling party of Croatia at the time, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). In 1993 the former Prime Minister Josip Manolić, head of security services and leader of HDZ party moderates gradually fell out of favour with President Franjo Tuđman, whose became increasingly aligned with extreme nationalists led by Defence Minister Gojko Šušak. In the spring of 1994, when it became apparent that Manolić would lose his post of Speaker of the Chamber of Counties (the short-lived upper house body in the Croatian Parliament), him and Stjepan Mesić, who was at the time Speaker of Parliament, organized a mass defection of HDZ members of parliament who formed a new party called Croatian Independent Democrats (HND), hoping to strip Tuđman of majority in the parliament. The attempt ultimately failed and Tuđman's party eventually managed to maintain power on the national level. However, in a number of local and regional assemblies the defection of HDZ members allowed opposition parties to gain majorities.

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