Ivo Sanader: A ‘Promising Lad’ who Came Unstuck

Zagreb | 02 July 2009 | By Drago Hedl

Ivo Sanader

The man who hoped to lead Croatia into NATO and the EU was cheated by fate of his second goal.

When the Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, won the parliamentary elections in 2003, after four years of Ivica Racan's rackety left-wing coalition, the then 50-year-old Sanader presented himself as a “promising lad”.

The Split-born politician was then at the height of his intellectual powers and neither too young nor too old for the demanding premiership.

His eloquent appearance, charm, knowledge of foreign languages (English, German, Italian and French) and allegedly good European ties, made him acceptable even to people who had strongly disliked the HDZ from the era of Franjo Tudjman.

Croats liked watching him communicate on an equal footing with foreign colleagues without a translator, unlike his predecessors who in similar situations were frustratingly glued to their interpreters.

When President Stjepan Mesic proposed him as prime minister designate in a new government on December 9, 2003, after Racan threw in the towel, Sanader sailed into government with a strong wind behind him.

He was supported by the improved situation within his party, where he had carried out a much-needed cleansing process, not much caring if he flushed out the odd baby with the dirty bathwater.

Sanader had been elected party leader at the Fifth General Assembly of the HDZ in April 2000, thus becoming Tudjman's successor.

When he strengthened his position two years later, as his position as party chief was confirmed at the Seventh General Assembly in April 2002, he grabbed the reins tight.

He got rid of – ironically, with the hearty aid of his current arch-nemesis Branimir Glavas – his then rival, Ivic Pasalic, and the people around him. Some of them he mercilessly threw out of the party. Others rallied to his side at the last moment and have served him loyally since.

Sanader’s rise to the top of the HDZ was certainly achieved with the aid of Glavas, whose strongmen from his Osijek fiefdom helped ensure that there were no unpleasant surprises when it came to voting for the new leader.

Facing no serious obstacles, Sanader found himself floating on calm political waters, convinced he would be the man to triumphantly lead Croatia into NATO and the European Union. In the first instance, he succeeded, in the second, he failed.

Sanader’s first mandate was relatively successful. His experience as commissary at the Croatian National Theatre in Split in 1991 and 1992 may have helped him to convincingly present results that might not always be that impressive. He certainly knew how to strike an actor’s pose and present a text learnt by heart as his own.

His brief, controversial, entrepreneurial experience between 1987 and 1991 in Innsbruck was less obviously useful when it came to grappling with the country's economic problems, however.

Nor was his brief experience in government in 1992-3 especially useful, when ministers rotated as rapidly as items on a factory assembly line, and when Sanader was a minister of science and technology. That is why he relied on advisors, associates, ministers and powerful people in the party.

Like most people at the top of the political pole, he did not welcome bearers of bad news. Those close to him say he refused to listen to warnings about the probable impact of the global recession, waving them off gruffly with his hand.

A philosopher by training (he finished the Faculty of Philosophy, and he won his doctor's degree in 1982 at the University in Austrian Innsbruck), he looked at the world with different eyes from those of an economist.

When he finally accepted that things were grinding to a halt in Croatia’s weak economy, he agreed to the formation of an Economic Council. But he did not listen to its advice, insisting only marginal cogs were breaking, not the driving wheels and axles.

The council served as an excuse that something was being done. But almost everything it proposed was swept under the carpet in the corridors of the Banski Dvori.

Although he seriously reformed the party, from time to time he revealed Tudjmanesque reflexes, seeming to view his authority as unquestionable.

However, he won Europe’s favour by making advances to the Serbian community, such as when he showed up at the Christmas party of the Serbian National Council and used the Orthodox greeting: “Christ is born.” He also broke bread with Serb returnees in the Knin area.

Although he delivered a fiery speech in Split in February 2001 in support of Mirko Norac, a general charged with – and since convicted of – war crimes, he did not blink when general Ante Gotovina was handed over to The Hague war crimes tribunal.

Admittedly, Gotovina did not travel to The Hague from Zagreb but from where he was arrested on Spain’s Canary Islands – which made the whole thing easier for the Prime Minister’s point of view.

That was the first time his position in the party was threatened, because the outraged remaining hawks in the party made an outcry. But Sanader knew how to play an expert hand, leaving it to Vladimir Seks to utter the famous slogan: “locate, arrest, transfer”, with reference to the remaining war-crimes indictees.

In 2005, Sanader allowed the investigation into war crimes to proceed against Glavas, whom – until Glavas started throwing his weight around and talking about the creation of an autonomous Slavonian region – he had called a “friend” and “visionary”.

The fact that the investigation against Glavas began in 2005, immediately after Glavas’s ejection from the HDZ, cast a shadow on the procedure, however.

Glavas used every opportunity to claim he was the victim of a political process through which Sanader wanted to take revenge for his success in the local elections with his new regional party, HDDSB.

Occasional affairs that surfaced around Sanader were less damaging. These involved, among others, the purchase of the house in Zagreb, receipt of allegedly shady donations, the collection of expensive watches, a private dinner in Verona paid for by the state budget and the provision of a super-luxurious, bullet-proof BMW. But these were not considered a mortal sin and certainly not resigning matters.

Sanader did not pay much special attention to such criticisms, though he did not ignore them entirely in the way that Tudjman had done when the story broke out about his presidential Challenger. While Tudjman was remembered for insisting that a head of state could not ride on a donkey, Sanadar pragmatically ordered the sale of the controversial car.

His second mandate began in 2007, after the HDZ won the parliamentary elections by a narrow margin. While the Social Democrat leader Zoran Milanovic self-confidently claimed that he and not Sanader would form a new government, the old prime minister already had a new cabinet in waiting. Such an opposition was a gift from God, politically, and Sanader often mocked them as “small-teethed cattle”.

On January 11 2008, parliament endorsed the second mandate of his government. Ana Lovrin and Berislav Roncevic had to be left out. He did not gladly remove these figures from his cabinet, but after the celebrated murder of Ivana Hodak and a subsequent eruption of public discontent, he sacrificed them both.

Within the party he had fewer problems, though. At the start of his second prime ministerial mandate in April 2008, he was easily re-elected, for the fourth time, as HDZ president.

Sanader placed most emphasis in the second mandate on the membership on the EU, especially after it became clear that NATO membership was virtually a done deal.

Besides being prime minister, he was also the de facto foreign minister. This was not difficult for him. He had obtained foreign ministerial experience as deputy foreign minister between 1993 and 1995 and from 1996 to 2000. In any case, the mild foreign minister, Jandrokovic did not object.

But Sanader’s European carriage got stuck in the Slovenian mud, and the more that Sanader tried to get out of it, the deeper it sank. The image of Croatia now took a knock, as it appeared that institutions remained riddled with corruption while reforms had got stuck.

Meanwhile the country sank deeper into economic crisis, which Sanader – when he finally realized it – seemed not capable of addressing.

Although Sanader often mocked the weak opposition for indecision, saying it did not know if wanted “to go pee-pee or poo-poo”, he was not beyond such criticism himself.

Some complained that he had become increasingly ready to meet all the demands made by protesters, even when there were no realistic possibilities to do so.

The last such example was a recent farmers’ protest. In order to get them to move their tractors from the Zagreb streets, the Prime Minister promised to meet all their demands, even though nobody knew where he would get the money.