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Nationalism and egalitarianism as elements of the populist narrative in 21st century Croatia

This paper is focused on populist features in the political life of Croatia from 2000 to 2020, with seven election circles (2000, 2003, 2007, 2011, 2015, 2016, 2020), numerous coalitions of the biggest two parties – HDZ (the Croatian Democratic Union) and SDP (the Social Democratic Party), and the rise of the several parties that can be considered as populist such as NGO the Human Wall (Živi zid) or the Bridge (MOST). Based on thorough historical and political analysis, our preliminary research indicates two important elements. First, in Croatia exists rich “populist” narrative transferred from the ubiquitous legacy of the former Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, whose influential combination of nationalism with populism made independent Croatia and has not been fought by any Croatian government so far, but political life can be understood also as periods of de-Tudjmanization and re-Tudjmanization. Second, with unfortunate socio-political context, Croatia acted as fertile ground for the rise of populist anti-elitism, anti-systemic or anti- establishment sentiment or the construction of “dangerous others” as a country burdened by the war-torn heritage, and in last two decades corruption of government officials with several big financial affairs etc. Accordingly, our analysis pays attention to the supply and demand of the populist narrative, i.e. value existence/construction. In line with that, methods of discursive and content analysis of political narrative, and analysis of value orientations were used. As nationalism and egalitarianism display as reliable elements for detecting the existence of a strategy of making borders within the populist field on the "we and they", these features are chosen as main in the analysis. For this conference, we singled out the political narratives used during the last three election circles in Croatia, from 2015 to 2020, since new populist parties/ movements/representatives also took part in them.

nationalism, populism, right-wing, nativism, Croatia, CDU, SDP, the Homeland Movement, On the Behalf of the Family

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