Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise - Indymedia

140 IRRECONCILABLE POSITIONS
Tudjman conducted his electoral campaign from explicit nationalist positions,
offering an economic program colored by state-capitalist views. I remember his
appearance on Croatian Television at the beginning of April 1990. 27 It seemed to
me at the time that Tudjman hardly had Yugoslavia in mind at all, not even as a
confederation. He spoke exclusively of Croatia and its sovereignty; Croatia had
to retain its “natural and historic borders”. A glance at the map, showing Croatia
as a half-moon around Bosnia, allowed the suspicion to arise that he aspired to
the inclusion of at least the Croatian parts of Bosnia. Tudjman was for a market
economy, but with the preservation of “national values”. The electoral meetings
which Tudjman held drew large crowds of up to 30,000 persons.
It seemed that the Croats had not yet registered the fact that they could
actually vote freely. So the groundswell of support for the HDZ emerged largely
in the last two weeks of the campaign. The first round on 22 April brought the
big surprise. The HDZ won 41.4 per cent of the vote for the lower house and 44
per cent of the vote in the Council of Communities; after the second round of
voting on 29 April, it was calculated that the party had obtained between 60 and
70 per cent of the seats in all houses of the Sabor, thus an absolute majority. 28
The reform communists received 23.7 per cent of the votes in the two main
chambers in the first round of voting. The clear defeat of the liberal Coalition of
National Understanding was surprising. The Coalition garnered only between 13
and 15 per cent of the votes for the two main houses in the first round and, in
accordance with the majority system, only a few mandates. The electoral law, as
the Slovenian daily Delo pointed out, had helped the HDZ. 29 To that one should
add that the HDZ did not draft the law. The Belgrade Politika wrote at the time
that Croatia was openly sliding from one one-party system to another. 30 The
Serbian Democratic Party won a few mandates in the Knin area. As concerns
regional divisions, Tudjman won an overwhelming victory in Zagreb but was
less successful in Osijek, or in Split and other Dalmatian cities. Rijeka, with its
strongly mixed population, voted predominantly reform-communist, and in
Istria, the regionalists were victorious.
Tudjman came across as very self-confident in a conversation we had shortly
after his victory, but in the decisive questions he was nonetheless realistic. 31
Indirectly he admitted that he had not expected his electoral victory or his ascent
to exclusive power in Croatia. He wanted to explain some of his statements in
the campaign, especially as regards Bosnia, in terms of his need to tap nationalist
votes. He said that the “almost plebiscitary decision of the Croatian people for
complete national freedom of decision” must be respected also on the international
plane. Those circles in the West who still dreamt of a centralized Yugoslavia
should finally bow to reality. Tudjman adopted the demand for the
transformation of Yugoslavia into a confederation. There could be, in the future,
a kind of “Europe in miniature”, i.e., a unified market-oriented economic space
founded on national states exercising their own sovereignty. He would not lay
any obstacles in the path of Marković, but the Prime Minister had to divorce
himself from his centralist fantasies. The division of labor and the division of