Politics and the Press.

Well, as someone has already noted in an e-mail to me, a Croatian candidate won the most votes for the Presidency of Bosnia. This means that not only will he be the Croatian member of the 3 seat presidency, he will also be the president of the presidents so to speak. This is a big deal for quite a few reasons. First, Croats are the smallest of the three main nationalities in Bosnia, so this really is kind of a surprise. The winner is also a member of the SDP party, which is basically the reformed communists and the least nationalistic of the Croatian political parties.

So, that was all politics, what about the press part you may be asking. Well, I'm getting to that. There are basically two daily papers in Zagreb that people read (there are more, but not a lot of people read those). Večernji list (Evening newspaper) is the older one. It was the main daily when I was here 20 years ago. In the last few years though, a new paper has come on the scene, Jutarnji list (Morning newspaper). As you can probably tell by the names, Jutarnji list set itself up as the "opposite" of the older paper. Jutarnji is very "modern" and has a kind of USA Today feel to it in it's graphics. Jutarnji list also seems to have a more "Europeanist" outlook to local politics. This is probably because Večernji list seems to have a very "nationalist" orientation, which I imagine they picked up in the late 80s. Right now, it seems that Jutarnji is winning the circulation battle, so Večernji has really extreme headlines and is always pushing "exclusive" stories.

So, bringing this back to politics and local reactions to the Croatian wining the Bosnian presidency, today's main headline from Večernji list was (roughly translated) "President with 1% of the Croatian Vote." Like I said, they like to be kind of alarmist in their headlines, but, underneath there was an important point. In fact, Komsic, the winner of the presidency, only got 330 votes in WesternHercegovinaa, which has a Croatian population of 30,000. That is kind of an important thing to take into account when looking at the results. It looks like Komsic's victory really was much more a win for the SDP then it was for "Croats" in Bosnia.

I am very happy to see SDP and SBiH (which I think is still Haris Silajdzic's party) do well, as they are both essentially anti-nationalist parties, but I don't think the Croats in Bosnia are behind the SDP's ideas as much as the results might make people think.