Nationalists back in power

last updated 8 January 2015

Zagreb, Croatia

Croatians voted out their pro-Western prime minister this week and returned a nationalist party to power. They gave the Croatian Democratic Union, known by its Croatian acronym HDZ, a majority in Parliament, and Prime Minister Ivica Racan conceded defeat. The HDZ was founded by the late Franjo Tudjman, who led Croatia to independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and then turned on the country’s ethnic Serbs during the bloody Balkan wars of that decade, forcing thousands of Serbs to flee. But the party says it has abandoned those hard-line ways and wants to lead Croatia into the E.U. “The HDZ rejects radicalism, extremism, xenophobia, and nationalism,” said party leader Ivo Sanader, who is likely to be the next prime minister. “You can rest assured that we will prove that.”