(At Least) Six Parties In Search Of A Coalition

The votes are in after yesterday's election in Croatia: HDZ have 61 Sabor seats, and SDP have 56, not counting the 5 seats voted for by the diaspora which will all but certainly go HDZ's way once they've been counted. Nonetheless, both HDZ's leader Ivo Sanader and his SDP counterpart Zoran Milanović say that they're in talks with other parties to form a government (if only Milanović had been this self-confident when he took over the party leadership in June, he might not be scrabbling for allies now at all).

Javno.hr is playing the numbers game: say SDP brings the urban liberal HNS and Istrian IDS on side. That should give them 67 seats, since Javno found an extra SDP one behind the sofa. HDZ ought to have 66, counting the diaspora, so on comes another round of hunt-the-coalition-partner. The far-right HSP are down to one seat (their leader Anto Đapić), and presumably not even HDZ would have the cheek to make an offer to Branimir Glavaš's Slavonian regionalist party HDSSB after Sanader spent most of last year getting its leader tried for war crimes. Which is exactly why SDP wouldn't dare ask him into government: although, given some of the PM candidate Ljubo Jurčić's off-colour comments during the summer, maybe all bets should be off. The pensioners' party HSU (as tracked by Dr Sean's Diary) have only one seat too, and will probably be auctioning it off to the highest bidder already. The peasant party HSS (5 seats) and shadow-of-their-former-selves liberals HSLS (2 seats) got Sanader out of trouble in 2003, but then there are the five seats for ethnic minorities (who might give SDP a leg up, but then again, might not).

Maybe anyone who can make head or tail of this deserves to run the country...

The Votes Are Not Quite In

There's high praise for Slaven Bilić, the manager of the Croatian football team, in Jutarnji list, where Vlado Vurušić applauds him as a model of 'Croatia as it should be' - making him 'the least typical manager Croatia has ever had.'

Bilić has a law degree, has dreamed of playing guitar with Bill Wyman, 'uncompromisingly suspended three important players [...] for sneaking out before the first qualifier against Russia to go drinking with some Dara Bubamara', and 'forced a nation which has often let itself be led by laughable and small-minded racism to love a dark-skinned Brazilian, Eduardo da Silva'. Although, if his work ethic is 'part of the mentality which, he once said, he obtained precisely by living in England' (Bilić is an ex-West Ham and Everton defender)... then please can we have him back once you've finished?

And if he's a socialist who even HDZ loyalists (read: much of the Croatian footballing establishment) have rallied around, shouldn't someone tell Zoran Milanović before Sunday's election?

Celebrity endorsements are nothing new for SDP (though you'd be best advised not to mention Severina in 2003), nor for HDZ, who went as far this year as to add singer Miroslav Škoro to their party list in Slavonia (Jutarnji list's latest poll predicts that he'll get in). The leading Croatian Serb party SDSS is usually a bit more circumspect, but now that Croatia shuttles its dvanaest bodova at Eurovision across the border as often as it does, there may be hope yet - or so the party apparently thought when it signed up Eurovision winner Marija Šerifović for a secret concert at the Zagreb Velesajam during its campaign.

Hello Elections, Goodbye Maksimir

There's a month to go before Croatia's parliamentary elections - hot on the heels of the Polish version - and still no sign, as yet, of the media's usual pre-election obsession: which singers will be performing at whose election meetings.

After HDZ's star-studded rallies before the first multi-party elections in 1990, most other parties tried to keep pace, making the 'they got paid how much to sing that?' article as common in the run-up to elections as the run-up to New Year's Eve. The level of excitement in 2003, when Severina sang at ten rallies for Ivica Račan's SDP for a rumoured €200,000, certainly hasn't been matched yet in 2007. Possibly because Račan lost the election in a display of unconvincing populism, which Novi list's Jelena Lovrić described as 'Mala-je-dala politics' in a reference to one of Seve nacionale's tartier songs.

One of Croatian music's biggest draws (for better or worse) will be absent in any case. Marko Perković Thompson, once upon a time a stalwart HSP supporter, will be otherwise engaged on a tour of the US and Canada in November - unless The New York Sun, which described Thompson as a 'neo-Nazi' singer in an article yesterday, has anything to do with it.

New York aside, there's already uncertainty whether his 4 November concert in Toronto has been called off or not: Thompson's tour organiser says no, but a Simon Wiesenthal Center press release states that the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center had the concert cancelled after a complaint to the venue's owners (much the same route taken by a different group to avert Thompson's Amsterdam concert in 2003).

And it's farewell (eventually) to the Maksimir stadium in Zagreb (the venue of Thompson's largest concert this year), due to be knocked down and replaced with a 53,000-seater affair on the city outskirts in Lanište (near the future handball arena) or Kajzerica. Needless to say, the Maksimir site, now owned by Zagreb council, will be sold off for enough money that 'another football stadium could be built with it' instead.

UPDATE: Leave it to Fox News to intervene in the Thompson case as unhelpfully as possible.

Showbusiness Ethnopolitics: Epicentar

Two years ago, Nova TV caused the television scandal of the month when their journalist Petar Vlahov went to Belgrade to interview Ceca Ražnatović for his Drugo lice talk show. Now another Nova TV show, Mirjana Hrga's Epicentar, is proving that the channel is no believer in the law of once bitten, twice shy.

Hrga's show on Sunday evening is scheduled to discuss the Serbian elections, and particularly the popularity of the Radical party. Epicentar's favoured expert to provide the Radical point of view? Serbian rock singer Bora Đorđević from the band Riblja čorba.

Perhaps predictably, Hrga has since received threats from the Society of Zagreb Defenders of Vukovar, a war veterans' group whose president Damir Jašarević told Jutarnji list, using much the same rationale as the protests against Drugo lice in 2005:

'We would accept the programme only if Đorđević would talk about what he knows about the Knin prison, the missing and fallen soldiers [braniteljima]. Everything else is rubbing salt into the wound when one knows that 1,200 Croats are still listed as missing. Therefore we will use all our means to prevent the programme going out. We're not afraid of prison.'

The Ceca Ražnatović Drugo lice never made it on to the air, but Hrga seems to have stronger support from the channel, which has even been rumoured to have hired security guards to ensure that Sunday's show can go ahead.

Showbusiness Ethnopolitics: Bosnian Election Time

The three so-called 'godfathers' of Croatian showbusiness politics - the patriotic trio of Marko Perković Thompson, Miroslav Škoro and Mate Bulić - are on slightly different sides for once thanks to the finale of election campaigning in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Namely: three Croat coalitions, three possible sets of election rallies to perform at.

Things are largely in the state they're in because of the split in the Bosnian Croat version of HDZ, which was formalised this April when HDZ 1990 (named after the date of HDZ's first election victory in Croatia) broke off from the existing HDZ BiH over the leadership of Dragan Čović.

According to Jutarnji list, Škoro will be performing for the HDZ 1990-coalition Hrvatsko zajedništvo (Croatian Unity) alongside Vanna and rock band Prljavo kazalište (both long-term HDZ allies in Croatia, although the Prljavci wavered in their support somewhat during the early Sanader era), but rumour is that Croatian HDZ warned them not to hire Thompson too in case his associations with the extremist right brought bad publicity.

No such qualms, however, for HDZ BiH, which promptly added Thompson to a portfolio already including 'pure-blooded Herzegovinan' Mate Bulić. It's quite a step up from the situation at the end of August, when it seemed that HDZ BiH's rallies would only be graced by Mija Martina Barbarić. (Last seen coming second in the 2005 Bosnian pre-selection for Eurovision, with a Wild dances-type Herzegovinan ethno-pop song called Ružice rumena which did most of what Moja štikla did, only with less Afrika, paprika, sijeno, slama, sir or salama.)

The far-right (further-right?) party HSP, meanwhile, has hired Thompson's ex-bassist Tiho Orlić, another local boy who Thompson began to launch on a solo career in 2004.

This is all par for the course in an ex-Yugoslav election year: as far as Croatia's concerned, HDZ's 1990 campaign wonks came up with the audience-grabbing tactic of hiring as many singers as possible to entertain the crowd between political speeches, leaving its competitors scrambling to catch up and cram some hastily arranged raly/concerts into the last few days of campaigning.

Herzegovinan showbusiness, however, has more ambitious aims: Mostar's Dnevni list reported a couple of weeks ago that Marko Zelić from the Široki Brijeg record label Song Zelex and record producer Ivo Lesić are planning an annual Herzegovinan Radio Festival (a la the successful Croatian and Serbian models) which would debut in August next year. Potential contestants apparently include 'Marko Perković Thompson, Miroslav Škoro, Dražen Zečić, Mate Bulić and others' - that'll be the usual suspects, then - and, for a longer shot, Macedonia's Toše Proeski and Ukraine's Ruslana.

If she's not available, though, the Gazette is sure they'd settle for Barbarić instead. What else was Ružice rumena meant to be doing?

UPDATE: According to 24 sata in Croatia, it now seems that Thompson isn't having anything to do with the HDZ BiH election rally at all, despite it being clearly advertised on the front page of the party's website yesterday; HDZ BiH supporters will have to be 'satisfied with Feminnem, Giuliano and Ivan Mikulić.'

Let's Take It From The Top

The Zagreb summer-break spirit seems to have infected the Gazette, which is slowly rediscovering its work ethic just as Catherine starts to wind down hers and think about spending a few days looking around castles in the Zagorje.

In approximately chronological order, these would probably have been full-length posts, if I'd had my act together.

Severina performed her summer season with her leg in plaster after an accident roller-skating in the dark, and revealed quite in passing to Jutarnji list that the team for her new album, due out at the end of the year, consists of Moja štikla's arranger Goran Bregović alongside Marina Tucaković, one of Serbia's most prolific pop/folk lyricists. Even more in passing, she described her 2000 hit Ajde, ajde, zlato moje as 'on the borders of turbofolk', although somehow that's less of a surprise than the Tucaković link-up.

Severina's pre-Bregović version of Štikla, the less comically folkloric Moj sokole, has had the sort of airplay one would expect from a summer hit by one of the most famous women in Croatia. Štikla, on the other hand, has not. Hari Mata Hari's Lejla, on the... third?... hand, has had more airplay than both songs put together. Which of the three would a visiting Martian think had been Croatia's Eurovision entry?

The fifteenth anniversary of Operation Oluja and the end of the Homeland War was marked by an official ceremony in Knin, and an all-day celebration in Čavoglave culminating in a concert by the village's most famous branitelj, Marko Perković Thompson. Thompson's own album, due late last year, may be delayed again now that he and his wife are expecting their third child - to be called Jelena if a girl (after the queen?), and Ilija for a boy (after the saint?).

The onset of Bosnian elections nautrally meant a race for the Croat parties to sign up famous musical names from the domovina. As of Večernji list's article in late August, Hrvatska koalicija (the Croatian Coalition) was counting on three acts who had all, in their time, been the biggest name in Croatian showbusiness ethnopolitics: Thompson, Miroslav Škoro and Prljavo kazalište. HDZ-BiH scooped up most of the other Herzegovinan pop singers of the moment, among them Mate Bulić, Ivan Mikulić, and girlband Feminnem.

Back in May, the Gazette's eye was caught by the line-up for Croatian singer Zorica Andrijašević's forthcoming album, namely, the Serbian folk songwriting team of Zoran Lesendrić-Kiki and Marina Tucaković (again). Andrijašević has now gone one better, according to this week's Arena magazine, and signed for the Serbian folk label Grand Productions - only the second Croatian singer to do so, says Arena, with the first being Siniša Vuco.

As East Ethnia reported at the time, three of Croatia's best-regarded alternative acts - TBF, Let 3, and Damir Urban - withdrew from Zadar's planned new rock festival Ups! when it turned out that the show would be sponsored by the Foundation for the Truth about the Homeland War, the lobby group founded in January with the aim of promoting... well, what else would it promote. The Foundation, apparently, got involved with Ups! 'to show that the historical truth about the Homeland War is not only supported by people who go to Thompson and Mate Bulić concerts', but may instead have helped to suggest the opposite.

The Gazette's more intrigued by who in the first place could have thought it was a good idea to invite the Letovci - whose current album deals with 'the collective memory, collective romances and irritations of the peoples who live in the states of former Yugoslavia', mainly by rearranging old newly-composed folk songs, adding swear words and wearing false moustaches - to a festival sponsored by an Ante Gotovina defence fund. (At least Gotovina never wore a moustache.)

Allowing me a brief trip into Glory of Carniola territory, the Slovenian singer Saša Lendero - who specialises in translating her Eurovision pre-selection entries into Croatian and re-entering them in Budva Festival or HRF - presented her summer hit Ne grem na kolena, currently available at her official site. It seems it isn't just turbo folk - Slovenian turbo polka - which has made it across from the Serbian and Bosnian markets: the trend for covering Greek pop songs has headed west as well. On the way, it's dropped Despina Vandi's Simera off in Croatia as Lana Jurčević's Odlaziš - but this does seem to be a year when Croatian music realised it had a little to catch up on.