Leader of the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SDP), Davor Bernardic, announced on Monday he will be stepping down as party leader after a parliamentary election debacle on Sunday, where the SDP, with its Restart coalition, has suffered the worst election result in more than 20 years.
After meeting with senior SDP membership on Monday, Bernardic spoke to the press, saying he would not seek re-election as party leader at the intra-party election which he said would be organised as soon as possible. SDP deputy leader, Zlatko Komadina, would serve as interim leader until the party elects a new one.
Although the polls conducted in the run-up to the election predicted a tight race between the Restart coalition and the ruling conservative Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), the incumbent Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic and his HDZ surfaced as convincing winners of the parliamentary election, having won 66 seats in the 151-seat Croatian parliament. The Restart coalition won only 41 seats, a lot less compared to the 56 seats as predicted by the latest polls before the election.
In the last parliamentary election, held in 2016, the SDP-led People’s coalition won 54 seats, coming in second after HDZ, which won 61. The loss resulted in then-party leader and 2011-2015 Prime Minister, Zoran Milanovic, stepping down to be replaced by Bernardic. In January this year, Milanovic won the presidential election as the SDP-backed candidate, beating the incumbent conservative Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, backed by the HDZ, by a comfortable 5-percent margin.
“The party leader is always the most responsible one, he’s at the front of the line,” Bernardic said on Monday. “It’s easiest to blame this result on low turnout, on this or that. I take responsibility. The SDP goes on, count on us.”
He added he would appear at the first assembly of the new parliament, but refused to say whether he would serve as MP.
Bernardic had already signalled late on Sunday he would offer his resignation, saying he was prepared to step down after consulting with party senior membership.
