Croatia's election commission said on Wednesday that 12 candidates for the December 22 presidential election had submitted the legally mandated petitions by the deadline which expired on Tuesday midnight.
Croatian law requires any candidate intending to run to collect a minimum of 10,000 signatures and submit them to the election commission.The commission now has a period of up to 48 hours to check the signatures for irregularities – considered a formality – before it reveals the full list of candidates cleared to run on Thursday.
The main candidates backed by major parties often demonstrate their clout by submitting much larger numbers of signatures. The incumbent, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, who will be seeking a second five-year term and who is supported by the ruling centre-right Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), had submitted 232,000 signatures.
According to latest polls, Grabar-Kitarovic is in the lead at around 32 percent of the vote, in front of former prime minister Zoran Milanovic, supported by the largest opposition party Social Democrats (SDP), who submitted 78,000 signatures, and is currently around 22 percent.
They are followed by singer-turned-politician Miroslav Skoro who runs on a right-wing platform and is currently around 17 percent, and former judge and MEP, Mislav Kolakusic, who has built up a large social media following with anti-corruption messages, at about 7 percent.
The field also includes film director and activist Dario Jurican, who is running a sarcastic parody campaign promoting “Corruption for All,” and has legally changed his name to Milan Bandic, after the long-time Zagreb mayor of the same name, who has been implicated in a series of investigations by anti-corruption police Uskok.
Other hopefuls span an ideological gamut from the left-wing cultural studies university professor Katarina Peovic and the liberal-backed economist Dejan Kovac to the far-right veteran Anto Djapic, the former head of the independent commission tasked with fining politicians for conflicts of interest, Dalija Oreskovic, and another anti-establishment activist and MP, Ivan Pernar.
Although office of the president is a largely ceremonial function in Croatia’s parliamentary system of government, the election is seen as a way of gauging the strength of political parties and a referendum on the incumbent’s five-year term.
Grabar-Kitarovic, who came into office in early 2015 after deposing the incumbent Ivo Josipovic by a paper-thin margin, is widely seen as a divisive figure, a populist whose mandate was marked by self-promotion stunts and a tendency to court far-right voters. In response, her main rival, the former Social Democrat prime minister, Zoran Milanovic, will try to entice centrist and left-leaning voters with a slogan promising a return to “normalcy.”
The full list of candidates is expected to be confirmed on Thursday, which is when the legally proscribed campaigning period is set to kick off. The unusually short campaigns will run until December 20, allowing for a day of election silence before Croatians go to the ballots on Sunday, December 22.
Unless a candidate wins an absolute majority of 50 percent plus one vote, the top two hopefuls will go to a run-off, scheduled for January 5.
