After a fierce campaign between two election rounds, and the first change of city government in two decades, it is a good time for a glance into the past of the turbulent last hundred years of elections in Zagreb.
Gendarmerie Against Communism: Heinzel Instead of Delić
The story begins with the March 1920 election for the City Representation, as the city representative body was then called. This was the first election at which there was no longer an educational and property census. Yet women, as well as soldiers and prisoners, were excluded from the electorate. The lists competed for 50 seats, which were distributed according to the Hare quota and the largest remainder method, without an electoral threshold. With a turnout of 77.1 percent, 40 percent of the seats were won by Communists, led by Svetozar Delić, formally assembled in the Socialist Workers' Party of Yugoslavia. Delić was elected mayor, but in less than a week Ban Matko Laginja will annul his election, and Communist councilors will be suspended. The star-crossed mayor had barricaded himself in the town hall for a few days but was eventually expelled from it by the gendarmerie. The Ban appealed to the pre-World War I law banning activities of revolutionary organizations, while the Communists’ reluctance to take the oath to the king also did not help their cause. It is worth mentioning that the Jewish Party also won two seats at the same election. In June, the centrist Croatian Union won the by-elections, reaching a total of 28 out of 50 seats. Only 13.6 percent eligible Zagrebers went to the polls. The Union’s candidate Vjekoslav Heinzel was elected to the top post, where he will remain for a total of eight years.
After the passing of the Vidovdan Constitution in 1921, a new city election was held. Heinzel was reelected as a candidate of the Croatian Bloc, i.e., the Croatian National Representation, which won a whopping 36 out of 50 seats, with a turnout of 75.5 percent. The Croatian Bloc, a coalition consisting of the Croatian Union, Radić's Croatian Republican Peasant Party and the Croatian Party of Rights, strived for a federalist transformation of the Kingdom of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs.
Tenants' Bloc and the 6 January Dictatorship
In 1925, according to the current election law, an election was held for half, i.e., 25 aldermen. The Croatian Bloc won win 15 seats, with a turnout of 47.1 percent. Meanwhile, Radić parted ways with the Croatian Bloc and led an independent HSS list in Zagreb. However, at the 1927 election, the Croatian bloc garnered 25 of the 50 seats, with a turnout of 57.5 percent. Runner-up was the Labor Alliance of Workers and Peasants, a party through which the Communists competed after the 1921 CPY ban. The Jewish Party, which at the time was already dominated by supporters of the establishment of the State of Israel, won three, and the Tenants' Bloc, a party that attracted Zagreb residents plagued by high rental prices and housing shortages, won two seats.
After the introduction of the king’s 6 January Dictatorship and the banning of all political parties in 1929, further city elections were suspended, while mayors were directly appointed by the Ban of the Sava Banovina. With the establishment of the Banovina of Croatia in the summer of 1939, new local elections were to be held. However, on the eve of the election, held in May and June 1940, Ban Ivan Subašić postponed the election in a number of urban areas, including Zagreb, fearing a Communist victory.
From Ustasha to People's Democracy
Following the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia, Pavelić will directly appoint a new mayor. However, after the death of mayor Ivan Werner in June 1944, the Ustasha authorities organized a new city election in August, according to the corporatist, estate principle. The regime called this ‘Ustasha democracy’, an alternative to bourgeois, Western democracy. Each corporation (workers, craftsmen, merchants, employees, etc.) had a certain number of representatives which proposed the names of councilors, but the final list of aldermen was made by the chief state corporatist and approved by Pavelić himself.
During the Partisan resistance, people's committees were established as a civilian form of government, while after the war they became the new local administration, initially functioning as a transmission mechanism of state (republican) authorities and not local government in the true sense of the word. Women will be given the right to vote, but citizens marked as enemies of the people will lose the suffrage. At the first post-war election in October 1945, 85.4 percent, or just over 140,000 Zagrebers voted for two lists, both composed of members of the Popular Front, led by the CP of Croatia. Dragutin Saili, whose nom de guerre was the Conspirator, became mayor. His formal title was the president of the City Board. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, almost every year, the mayorship alternated. This changed with Većeslav Holjevac, who will remain at the helm of Zagreb from 1952 to 1963. In 1963, the City Assembly was established in its present form.
From HDZ Hegemony to the Zagreb Crisis
From 1974 to 1990, delegate elections were held, whereby citizens elected their councilors in the workplace (organizations of associated labor), as well as through mass organizations (League of Communists, Confederation of Trade Unions, Federation of Veterans' Associations et al.) in three (initially five) chambers of representatives. Thus, the city government mirrored the structure of workers’ self-management elections used for the Croatian Sabor. By the same token, City Assembly members were elected through a two-round majoritarian local election held concurrently with the 1990 parliamentary election. HDZ elected 49 out of 66 councilors in the Council of Associated labor and won 51 out of 56 seats in the Council of Municipalities and 39 out of 40 seats in the Socio-Political Council. The actor Boris Buzančić, who played the Split mayor Vice in the Velo misto series, was elected new mayor of Zagreb.
In 1993, the city election was held according to the same parallel voting system as the parliamentary election. Out of 60 Assembly members, half was elected in single-member districts, while the other half came from city-wide lists, with the application a three-percent threshold and the D’Hondt method. With a turnout of 67.6%, HDZ won just over 220,000 votes, which amounted to 35 seats (17 out of 30 list seats and 18 out 30 direct seats). Branko Mikša, Minister of Tourism and Commerce in the Šarinić Cabinet, became mayor.
Međutim, 1995. godine će Zagreb biti pripojen Zagrebačkoj županiji, a gradonačelnik istovremeno i župan te županije. Skupština je smanjena na 50 zastupnika, uz dvije trećine listovnih i jednu trećinu izravnih mandata. Oporba, udružena u široku koaliciju, koja je sezala od ASH do HSP-a, pobjeđuje, osvojivši ukupno 34 mandata. Uslijedit će političko-pravna situacija poznata kao „Zagrebačka kriza“, koja će potrajati dvije godine. Tih godina po gradu su bile popularne bijele majice na kojima je stajalo „i ja sam zagrebački gradonačelnik“. Udružena oporba bira Gorana Granića iz HSLS-a za gradonačelnika, no Tuđman, koji je po zakonu trebao formalno potvrditi župana, odbija ga potvrditi. Gradska većina zatim predlaže Jozu Radoša (HSLS), nasuprot kojega Tuđman imenuje Marinu Matulović-Dropulić, ministricu prostornog uređenja, graditeljstva i stanovanja u Matešinoj vladi. No, Skupština ju odbija izglasati te bira Ivu Škrabala (HSLS). Predsjednik ponovno imenuje svoju kandidatkinju, a Skupština pak bira Dražena Budišu, kojeg Pantovčak također odbija te Banski dvori postavljaju Vladinog povjerenika Stjepana Brolicha. Zdravko Tomac to uspješno osporava ustavnom tužbom, a nakon savjetodavnog referenduma državna vlast popušta te ponovno izdvaja Zagreb iz županije.
For the new election, the number of direct seats was reduced to one quarter, while the remaining three quarters of councilors were elected from a citywide list. HDZ won 24 seats, one short of a majority. It finally gained control of the Assembly with the help of two HSS councilors who crossed the floor, leading to Matulović-Dropulić’s election to Zagreb’s first female mayor.
From Cvrco to Senf
The 2000 snap election was triggered by a vote of no confidence, after opposition councilor Milan Bandić (called Cvrco in his school years) had collected signatures not just of the 24 members of the opposition, but also two HDZ aldermen. The city was taken over by Josip Kregar as the Government's commissioner. This election saw only 33.7 percent of eligible citizens head to the polls and a victory of the opposition led by SDP and HSLS. The new Assembly majority gave the mayorship to Bandić. The next year, SDP will alone gain 20 out of 51 seats, albeit with a turnout of 39.8 percent. Bandić was reelected mayor yet had to turn over the executive post to his deputy Vlasta Pavić from 2002 until the new election in 2005 due to his drunk driving and attempted bribery of a road patrol. In 2005, 36 percent went to the polls, with just over 100,000 votes going to SDP, amounting to 25 out of 51 seats. Bandić will once more have to hand over the mayorship to his female colleague – from 2014 to 2015 he was deputized by Sandra Švaljek while he sorted out ‘misunderstandings’ with judiciary and criminal investigation authorities.
The introduction of direct mayoral elections increased citizen participation, leading to a turnout of 41.7 percent of Zagrebers in the 2009 first round, when Bandić missed an outright victory by a hairbreadth (48.5 against 23.2 percent for Kregar). Four years later, the turnout will increase to 44.2 percent, with Bandić going in a runoff with former party colleague Rajko Ostojić, again missing a first round victory by a few percentage points. Bandić secured his last term in 2017, garnering some 30,000 votes from than Anka Mrak-Taritaš in the runoff. Mrak-Taritaš and the incumbent mayor Tomislav Tomašević (privately known as Senf) were the only mayoral candidates that ran both in 2017 and 2021. These two showcased a dramatic change in the number and percentage of votes gained in a four year span. While Tomašević received just shy of 13,000 votes (3.9 percent) in the first round in 2017, in 2021 he reached almost 150,000 (over 45 percent). On the contrary, four years ago, Mark-Taritaš gained the support of just over 80,000 Zagrebers (one quarter of the vote), but this May she reached the penultimate position, with less than 3,000 votes (0.83 percent).
Into a Brighter Future
After this overview of a century of city elections, bordering on tragic comedy, one can only hope that the next hundred years will bring a continuation and consolidation of a tradition of free, fair, and competitive elections, which will finally attract a vast majority, and not merely a half of Zagreb voters, to springtime polling stations.
