In the first handover of power in the City for twenty years, Tomašević, an environmental and right to the city activist, and his two deputies, Danijela Dolenec, a professor in the Faculty of Political Science, and Luka Korlaet, a professor in the Faculty of Architecture, both of the University of Zagreb, formally take over on Friday 4 June 2021, for a four-year term. One of the first challenges for the new team is to assess the competences and commitments of some 27 heads of department, all of which have employment contracts that do not require them to step down when there is a change of government, and many of which were appointed based on party affiliations. In the longer term, a restructuring of the City administration is meant to lead to no more than 16 such departments or, in effect as Tomašević calls them, City Ministries.
Although negative campaigning and scare tactics against the coalition began long before the first round, these increased immensely in the run-off, with Skoro using the time to enhance his standing on the right, suggesting that the left had to be stopped at all costs. Members of his team, on a daily basis, produced so-called ‘evidence’ that leading members of the platform were connected with civil society organisations that had both taken public money to fund their activism and were in the pockets of foreign powers, including Soros, of course. At its most absurd, right-wing former Minister of Culture Zlatko Hasanbegović suggested that the platofrm was composed of theorists (he used the masculine form of the noun) of lesbian-syndicalism. The nature of the response from Tomašević, the platform, and its supporters can be seen as a classic ‘how to guide’ for the green-left in terms of winning elections. When Skoro placed billboards revealing that the platform was like a watermelon, green on the outside but red on the inside, many of the facebook pages of supporters displayed watermelons proudly. Tomašević continued to run a positive campaign, insisting that the focus should be on the problems of the City and often demonstrating his opponent’s lack of knowledge of these.
Of course, the potential disconnect between winning elections and taking power noted in my earlier text remains. Expectations of the new administration from a public eager for change are high and Tomašević has acknowledged this but also urged a degree of patience, not least because there is the need for a thorough revision of the City’s finances. Nevertheless, the extent of the victory, and the refusal to be drawn away from a radical vision of change, bodes well for other parts of the country, where Možemo! did well and, indeed, where another activist, Suzana Jasić, was elected Mayor of the town of Pazin in Istria, and for the wider region, indicating a rejection by voters of decades of clientelistic politics and the possibility of grassroots-led radical change.
Paul Stubbs is a UK-born sociologist who has lived and worked in Zagreb, Croatia since 1994. His work focuses on policy translation, international actors in social policy and, increasingly, on the history of Yugoslav socialism, social welfare and the Non-Aligned Movement. His latest edited book Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: social, cultural, political and economic imaginaries will be published by McGill-Queens’ University Press in 2022.
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