Milanovič’s rival – doctor, geneticist and forensic scientist Dragan Primorac, running for the governing Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), received 25.42 percent of the vote.
Milanović has been at the head of the country since 2020, he has now been elected for a second term. A man who does not mince words and does not hesitate to use indiscriminate insults against his political opponents, according to polls, he has long been the most popular politician in the country.
In the last three years, he has held a number of pro-Russian positions and is also critical of Western aid to Ukraine attacked by Russia. He stated, for example, that as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, he would not allow Croatian soldiers to “participate in activities that push Croatia to war.”
Between 2011 and 2016, he held the post of Prime Minister. He returned to politics after a three-year break in June 2019, when he announced his presidential candidacy with the support of the opposition Social Democratic Party. Before entering the race for the post of head of state, he was engaged in his own consulting firm.
Milanović clearly won the first round of the presidential elections in Croatia
Elections
He justified his return to politics, among other things, by the need to create a counterweight to the long-term strongest Croatian political party, i.e. the HDZ. “Always, when the Croatian Democratic Community held all the levers, Croatia was not doing well,” he said, for example.
Zoran Milanović was born on October 30, 1966 in Zagreb, his father was a Communist Party official. In the early 1970s, however, Milanović the elder had to leave politics because he joined a group promoting greater emphasis on the position of the Croatian nation in the Yugoslav federation. He returned after the breakup of Yugoslavia, but unlike his son, in the ranks of the HDZ. “Choose yourself, but in the second case you will meet more communists there,” he allegedly advised his son when he was hesitating between SDP and HDZ in the 1990s.
The younger Milanović, who denies that he belongs to the descendants of the “red nobility”, studied law and after a short engagement at court got a job in diplomacy in 1993. In May 2007, he became the head of the Social Democrats. After a relatively narrow loss to the HDZ in autumn 2007, four years later he led them to an election victory and became the head of the government himself. During his tenure, Croatia joined the European Union as its 28th member in July 2013, which Milanović classified as one of the greatest achievements of his career.
He is married. He met his wife Sanja, who is a doctor, during his studies, they got married in 1994. They have two sons.
Croatia returns to compulsory military service
Foreign
