Published in Nacional number 732, 2009-11-24

Autor: Robert Bajruši

POLITICAL report

Mesic does not want Bandic to succeed him

BEFORE HIS AIDES THE CROATIAN PRESIDENT is increasingly describing Milan Bandic as a dangerous populist

END OF A FRIENDSHIP Although their collaboration over the past ten years has seen no snags, their relations have cooled completely because Mesic does not want to see Bandic in the President's Office on Pantovcak
END OF A FRIENDSHIP Although their collaboration over the past ten years has seen no snags, their relations have cooled completely because Mesic does not want to see Bandic in the President's Office on Pantovcak Croatian President Stjepan Mesic has firmly opposed the possibility that he could be succeeded by Milan Bandic. Mesic is with growing frequency in internal discussion with his close aids describing the Mayor of Zagreb as a populist whose election to the post of Croatian President would be very dangerous.

According to the information from the President's Office there are three reasons why the plug has been pulled on the until-recently firm alliance between the two powerful politicians. These are Bandic's newly found inclination to the positions advocated by the Church and conservative clerical circles, his coquetting with the political right wing and critics of antifascism, and his dependence on dubious private sector circles.

Because of these three sins, Mesic will definitely not call on citizens to vote for Bandic, what is more, he will be exercising the most extraordinary benevolence if he restrains himself over the coming month in openly attacking the SDP dissident. Nacional has learned this from persons who enjoy Mesic's absolute confidence, and it was further confirmed over the weekend by two other credible sources. It is quite clear now that Mesic by no means wishes to see Bandic as the next president. The first signs of the rift came in the interview Mesic gave to Nacional last week.

A question about his conflicts with the leadership of the Catholic Church yielded an unexpected reaction from the President when he said that, "It is the same with some people who were in the Union of Communists up to 1990.

The communist party transformed into the Social Democrat Party that year, but that does not mean that those former communists also reformed themselves to become social democrats. And now they have become true Catholics and make public appeals that it is time that a true believer take the post of Croatian President." Mesic would not state explicitly to whom he was referring, but it was clear from his words that Bandic was at issue. A message came from Mesic's office on Monday morning that the President does not wish to speak about the candidates before the first round is over.

The same goes for Milan Bandic, was the message conveyed by Mesic's aides. When the decorum of the protocol is abstracted, however, it is evident, after an entire decade of cooperation, that Mesic and Bandic are no longer on good terms. They greet each other politely at public meetings, but that is as far as it goes, even though the President just this spring was of the opinion that the SDP had erred in not nominating Zlatko Komadina or Milan Bandic as their presidential candidate.

And as Bandic ever more directly promoted himself as a candidate, so too did the distance grow by which Mesic distanced himself from what was until yesterday a closely affiliated politicians with whom he agreed on most issues.

The estrangement culminated after Bandic's nomination was announced, and from that moment on, the two have found themselves on opposite sides. Mesic is now definitely convinced that electing Bandic would be a bad choice because it would to a large extent mark the end to the continuity of the policies that have been led from the President's Office since 2000. In short, there are three key issues over which Bandic and Mesic have parted ways on, these being the different private sector groups they are inclined towards, the policy towards the Catholic Church and preserving the antifascist legacy. Mesic is convinced that Bandic will lead policies differing from his own in all three areas.

When it comes to private sector circles it is no secret that President Mesic has his own favourites, among which are, let's say, the recent head of the INA oil company Tomislav Dragicevic, and the directors of various state-owned corporations. One of the examples of these differences is evident in the powerful construction lobby, where Bandic favours IGH and Jure Radic, while Mesic is close with INGRA and Igor Oppenheim, who is for his part at odds with the Mayor of Zagreb.

A Bandic victory would probably lead to personnel changes in most state-owned companies and people who enjoy his confidence would take over some of the leading positions there. That would also mean the abdication of Mesic's people, which the current president is unwilling to accept. This is, at the same time, one of the reasons that Mesic is disposed to endorsing Nadan Vidosevic if he should make it to the runoff round. It is less about Vidosevic's potential as a manager, and much more about the fact that he would for the most part not touch Mesic's people in the economy.

A reason of no less significance is the issue of "Church policy". Bandic's propinquity to the Catholic Church is an exceedingly important reason for Mesic's having renounced him. The current President has been at odds with people in the Church almost his entire term in office, and the spectrum of his critics among the clerical is an imposing one - from the Croatian Conference of Bishops which gathers the entire Church leadership, the Military Ordinariate led by Juraj Jezerinac and his former assistant Andelko Kacunko, leading representative of the Benedictine Order, to numerous diocesan priests who have called Mesic a traitor at masses and processions, sometimes implicitly and more frequently quite openly.

The running dispute of many years with the Glas koncila newspaper and its chief editor Ivan Miklenic is a well known matter, and attacks on the head of state from church corners have happened abroad too, like a few months ago when Mesic was criticised in Munich by demonstrators that had been incited a few days earlier by a member of the local Croatian Catholic Mission, Father Tomislav Dukic.

The Church has tried to distance itself from this scandal, but it is undeniable that Dukic made a public appeal for demonstrations and said that he would personally participate in them. Bandic's relationship with the Catholic Church is a quite different one, and one could of late speak of an overt alliance. Bandic has for years pointed out that he is a Catholic and a believer, and cites his mother and God as paragons.

More important, however, is the material aspect of his relationship with the Church. Bandic is one of the chief financiers of the Catholic Church and it is thanks to the million-kuna donations from the Zagreb budget that many Church projects have been seen through.

The money that is handed out to the Church from Zagreb has for years on his orders also gone to other regions, from Slavonia and Bosanska Posavina to Herzegovina and Dalmatia. All those who maintain contacts with the Church have known for years that at the seat of the Catholic Church in Croatia, at Kaptol, and among many priests, that Croatia's most popular politician is in fact Milan Bandic. He is, especially over the past five years, more popular than the recent HDZ Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, who has nuns and priests among his closets relatives, was. From the Church's perspective Sanader avoided implementing every single demand it made, while Bandic has fulfilled numerous requests.

According to the official data, Bandic has donated 8 million kuna to the dioceses of Zagreb, Zadar, Sibenik and Dakovo, and that is only a part of the money he has paid out for the needs of the Church. That is why Ivica Racan engaged his services in discreetly establishing an informal line of communication between the SDP and the Church, but as Bandic grew apart from the Social Democrats, so too did the possibility of cooperation between the Catholic Church and the political left wing weaken. Prior to announcing his presidential bid he was visited by the president of the Croatian Conference of Bishops, Marin Srakic.

Srakic did not, of course, call upon the faithful to vote for Bandic, but his visit to the office of the Mayor of Zagreb was enough of a message. Some ten days later Milan Bandic met with a group of some 300 priests, and there were no other politicians there besides him, much less presidential candidates. Bandic has of late become partial to the Catholic Church and its permanent criticism of antifascism.

Even Franjo Tudjman grasped the importance of the continuity of present day Croatia with the World War II antifascist movement, and Mesic is a convinced adherent of the Partisan movement tradition. In spite of disgraceful events, especially in the 1990s when over three thousand Partisan monuments were destroyed, no administration has officially distanced itself from the antifascist tradition. The entire time the Catholic Church has been the only major institution in Croatia that has claimed that the Partisan movement was a criminal one and responsible for subsequent communist crimes.

The vast majority of the priesthood is very anti-communist, with no distinction made between antifascism and communism in their criticism.
Nominally so far Bandic has belonged to the other side. The SDP always underlined the achievements of antifascism, one of the reasons it has come under fire from the Catholic Church. A significant piece of information is that the bishops and the Catholic newspaper Glas koncila, which use every opportunity to lash out at liberal-leftist politicians, have never criticised him, much less pointed out the fact that he was for years a member of the Communist Party.

It was only a question of time before Stipe Mesic would attack Bandic over his coquetry with the political right. Mesic is an uncompromising champion of antifascism, as a result of which he has even quarrelled with Zoran Milanovic when the SDP president decided to pay his respects to those who had fallen in the forced marches after World War II. In Bandic's case the situation is even more dramatic and the division is best illustrated by the fact that Mesic was this year at a commemoration to the victims of the Ustashe camp in Jasenovac, while Bandic was on the island of Daksa, where he joined priests from Dalmatia in honouring people that had been shot by Partisan firing squads when they liberated Dubrovnik in 1944.

MILAN BANDIC with Racan and Mesic at a time when he had not yet openly revealed his right wing affinities
MILAN BANDIC with Racan and Mesic at a time when he had not yet openly revealed his right wing affinities There were innocent people among the victims at Daksa, but also many who had collaborated with the Nazis and Ustashe. For the Catholic Church they are all innocent victims of the communist regime, and by coming to the commemoration Bandic demonstrated that he agreed with this line of though, which is in complete opposition to the positions advocated by Mesic. As Mayor of Zagreb Bandic allowed Croatia's leading rightist singer, Marko Perkovic Thompson, whose concerts traditionally open with the salute "ready for the homeland," to stage a concert on Ban Jelacic Square.

Mesic is vehemently opposed to Thompson, and he recently demanded the sacking of Foreign Minister Gordan Jandrokovic, who had tried to convince the Swiss authorities to allow the rightist musician to perform in their country. An additional reason for the parting of ways should be sought in the support Bandic gets from various veterans' associations.

In most cases war vets are emphatic critics of Mesic and have accused him of betraying the Homeland War and collaborating with the Hague tribunal. Unlike Mesic, the members of veterans' associations strongly support Bandic, who has provided subsidised housing and secured jobs for them in Zagreb, and who has provided material aid to branches of veterans' association in other parts of Croatia. Bandic's presidential bid is also supported by the HDSSB, a party founded by fugitive war criminal Branimir Glavas.

This support is just another part of the mosaic of reasons that have led Stipe Mesic to the opinion that a Milan Bandic victory would be quite dangerous for Croatia. Mesic fears that, in the event of a Bandic victory, the policies he has pursued as President of the Republic over the past decade would be reconstructed from the ground up. Instead of a separation of the Church and the State, there would be a restoration of the state of affairs present during the term in office of Franjo Tudjman, when bishops were very welcome guests at the President's Office.

Conservative Catholic clerics would acquire a confederate in the most important function in the country, and the achievements of antifascism and of ZAVNOH (the State Antifascist Council of the National Liberation of Croatia) would be brought into question. No one expects Bandic to flirt with the Ustashe movement, but just a partiality towards the policies advocated by the bishops would lead to a de-Mesic-isation of sorts.

In part because of his own ego, but above all because of the principled politics he has led ever since coming into office, Mesic does not wish to concede to this development of the political situation in Croatia. The Croatian President still refuses to state decisively whom he would like to see as his successor, but one thing is sure - it is by no means Milan Bandic.

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