CROATIA has been an economic and political basket-case for years, but the events of the past few weeks demonstrated that things could still get worse. On June 16th the government collapsed, a day after the leader of the ruling party resigned over a conflict of interest (his wife had been paid by a Hungarian energy company). The president stood passively by. Then on June 17th hooligans threw flares onto the pitch during a game Croatia had been winning at the Euro 2016 football championships in France. This apparently constituted a greater crisis than the fall of the government, and the president called an emergency cabinet session.
Ever since Croatia proclaimed independence from a disintegrating Yugoslavia in 1991, its politics have been dominated by the Social Democrats on the left and the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) on the right. Social scientists observe that for many Croats, voting has less to do with left- or right-leaning ideological beliefs than with whose side one’s family was on during the second world war. In Croatia this was also a civil war between Yugoslav communists and supporters of the Nazi-backed Ustasha regime.
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