How Croatia dismantled the constitution it wrote for a war

Why the constitution came before the country

The Sabor adopted the Constitution of Croatia on 22 December 1990, replacing the 1974 constitution of the Socialist Republic of Croatia. Croatia was at that point still a republic inside Yugoslavia, and the document was written by a parliament elected eight months earlier in the first multi-party elections held since Communist rule began.

Those elections followed a change in the law. The Civil Organisations Act was formally amended on 11 January 1990 to allow political parties, legalising the ones already founded: the Croatian Social Liberal Party had been established on 20 May 1989 and the Croatian Democratic Union on 17 June 1989. Thirty-three parties were registered by the first round on 22 April 1990, and the runoff followed on 6 May 1990.

The constitution passed in December 1990 categorised Serbs as a minority group along with other ethnic groups. On 21 December 1990, one day before it was adopted, an administration led by Milan Babić announced the creation of a Serbian Autonomous Oblast of Krajina, and other Serb-dominated communities in eastern Croatia announced that they would join it and stop paying taxes to the government in Zagreb.

Independence itself was put to a vote. Parliament voted on 2 May 1991 to hold a referendum, and on 19 May 1991, with a turnout of almost 80%, 93.24% of those voting chose independence. Krajina boycotted that referendum, having held its own a week earlier, on 12 May 1991, in the territories it controlled, where the vote was to remain in Yugoslavia. The Croatian government did not treat the earlier vote as valid. Parliament declared independence on 25 June 1991, and the constitutional decision severing the ties took effect on 8 October 1991.

The 1990 constitution remains in force and has been amended four times, in 1997, 2000, 2001 and 2010. Underneath it sits a civil law system whose institutional framework carries the legal inheritance of Austria-Hungary, which is the part of the arrangement that no amendment has touched.

Which parties Croatia had before it had a state

Croatian party politics is older than the Croatian state by well over a century. The first modern parties formed in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the years after the revolutions of 1848, when the Sabor and Ban Josip Jelačić were arguing for the severance of ties with the Kingdom of Hungary and for closer links to the other South Slavic lands of the empire.

Two parties that took shape in the 1860s carried most of that argument. The Party of Rights, led by Ante Starčević and Eugen Kvaternik, and the People's Party, whose figures included Josip Juraj Strossmayer and Ivan Mažuranić, both rested their case on a claim of uninterrupted Croatian statehood reaching back to the early Middle Ages. Against them stood the National Constitutional Party, which held power for most of the period between the 1860s and 1918 and argued for closer ties with Budapest. The Croatian-Hungarian Settlement of 1868 gave that argument its terms: Croatian statehood was formally recognised, and real control over Croatian affairs was not.

Elections were frequent and the electorate was narrow. Between 1861 and 1918 there were seventeen elections in the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia and ten in the Kingdom of Dalmatia, where the contest ran between the People's Party and an Autonomist Party that wanted Dalmatia kept separate. The Croat-Serb Coalition, formed out of the Party of Rights, the Serb People's Independent Party and others, governed Croatia from 1903 to 1918 under Frano Supilo and Svetozar Pribićević.

The Croatian Peasant Party, founded in 1904 and led by Stjepan Radić, became the most widely supported Croatian party in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and the main opponent of the 1921 constitution that defined the new state as unitary and ended Croatian autonomy. Radić was shot in the Yugoslav parliament in 1928, King Alexander imposed a dictatorship in January 1929, and the party's long campaign for federalisation produced the Cvetković-Maček Agreement of August 1939 and an autonomous Banovina of Croatia. That party resumed operating inside Croatia in December 1989, after fifty years abroad and a single-party system that had run since the 1945 election, in which the Communists stood unopposed because the other parties abstained.

How the presidency lost its executive powers

Under the constitution as written in 1990, Croatia operated a semi-presidential system, and it did so for a decade. Franjo Tuđman won the presidential elections of 1992 and 1997. Between 1995 and 1997 he refused to formally acknowledge the local election results in the City of Zagreb, producing what became known as the Zagreb crisis, and in 1996, when the broadcasting rights of the radio station Radio 101 were revoked, some 120,000 people protested in Ban Jelačić Square against the decision.

Tuđman died in 1999. In the parliamentary elections of early 2000 a centre-left coalition under Ivica Račan took office, and that government amended the constitution, transferring most of the executive powers of the presidency to parliament and to the prime minister. Stjepan Mesić won the presidency in 2000 and again in 2005 on a Croatian People's Party ticket.

What the office kept is still substantial on paper. The president is head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces, is directly elected for a five-year term, has the procedural duty of appointing the prime minister with the consent of the Sabor by a majority of all its members, and has some influence over foreign policy. Two constitutional restrictions shape the office more than the powers do: a holder is limited to two terms, and the president may not be a member of any political party, so a president-elect withdraws from party membership before inauguration.

Executive power proper sits with the government, headed by the prime minister, with deputy prime ministers who also serve as ministers and further ministers appointed by the prime minister with the consent of the Sabor. The government proposes legislation and the budget, executes the laws, and directs foreign and domestic policy from its official residence at Banski dvori.

Trust in the office is not evenly spread across the map. Research published in 2023 on the Habsburg Military Frontier, the buffer zone established in the sixteenth century and abolished in 1881, drew on individual-level surveys conducted between 2010 and 2016 and found that people living in the former military territory reported lower trust in the presidency than those in the former civilian territory, alongside lower trust in others generally and higher trust in their own families.

How the Sabor reached its present shape

The Sabor is a single chamber, and it took a decade of subtraction to become one. A second chamber, the Chamber of Counties, was set up in 1993 under the 1990 constitution, composed of three deputies from each of the twenty counties and the City of Zagreb. Having no practical power over the Chamber of Representatives, it was abolished in 2001 and its powers were handed to the county governments.

The number of members is not fixed either. It can vary from 100 to 160, all elected by popular vote for four-year terms, and the election held in 2016 returned 151 of them. Sessions run in two periods, from 15 January to 30 June and from 15 September to 15 December, with extra sessions callable by the president of the republic, the president of the parliament or the government.

The powers of the chamber run wider than legislating. It enacts and amends the constitution, adopts the state budget, declares war and peace, alters the boundaries of the country, calls referendums and elections, appoints and relieves officers, supervises the government and other holders of public power answerable to it, and grants amnesty. Decisions are taken by majority vote when more than half the chamber is present, except on constitutional questions.

Why the census decides who holds seats

Most members arrive through a conventional proportional system. 140 of them are elected in ten multi-seat constituencies drawn on county borders and adjusted so that the number of eligible voters in each falls within 5% of the others, using the D'Hondt formula with a 5% threshold.

The remaining seats are the interesting ones, because they are allocated by who a voter is or where a voter lives instead of by which constituency they belong to. Citizens living abroad vote in an eleventh constituency, whose size was once calculated from the votes cast: it returned five members in the 2007 election, and constitutional changes first applied in 2011 permanently assigned it three. Eight further members are elected by voters belonging to the twenty-two recognised minorities.

Those entitlements rest on a count taken once a decade, and the count is falling. The 2021 census recorded 3,871,833 inhabitants, 413,056 fewer than in 2011, a drop of 9.64%, with the sharpest declines in the Slavonian counties: Vukovar-Srijem lost 20.28% of its inhabitants between the two censuses and Sisak-Moslavina 19.04%, against 2.90% in the City of Zagreb. By declared ethnicity in 2021, Croats made up 91.63% of the population and Serbs 3.20%, with Bosniaks at 0.62% and every other minority individually below 0.50%.

The census does more than describe. Croatian law ties the equal official use of a minority language and script in a local unit to that minority's share of the local population, and the 2021 figures moved one of those thresholds: the report on the results recorded the number of Serbs in the city of Vukovar falling below 30%, ending the right to equal official use of the language and script there. Six minority languages are in official use somewhere in the country under these provisions: Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Pannonian Rusyn, Serbian and Slovak. The same counting logic reaches down to local councils, where electoral committees check whether the minorities are represented as the constitution requires, and where candidates from an unrepresented minority are added to the council from the lists if the proportional count has returned none.

Who appoints the judges and who prosecutes

The judiciary has three tiers of general jurisdiction: thirty-two municipal courts, fifteen county courts, and the Supreme Court as the highest court of appeal, whose hearings are open and whose judgments are public except where the privacy of the accused is protected. Judges are appointed by the State Judicial Council and hold office permanently until the age of seventy. The president of the Supreme Court is the exception, elected for a four-year term by parliament on the proposal of the president of the republic.

That council is where the appointment power actually sits, and its composition is mixed by design. Eleven members serve four-year terms and may serve no more than two: seven judges, two university professors of law, and two members of parliament, all nominated and elected by parliament. The council appoints every judge and court president other than at the Supreme Court, and it also runs the disciplinary side, with appeals against its decisions heard by the Constitutional Court.

Constitutional questions go to a separate bench of thirteen judges, elected by parliament for eight-year terms, who choose their own president for four years. The court rules on whether challenged legislation conflicts with the constitution and repeals it where it does, reports breaches of the constitution to the government and to parliament, declares the speaker of parliament acting president on a petition from the government if the president becomes incapacitated, and must consent before criminal proceedings can begin against a sitting president or before one can be arrested.

Prosecution runs on its own track. The State Attorney's Office represents the state in legal proceedings from a central office in Zagreb that coordinates fifteen county and twenty-six municipal offices, and the General State Attorney is appointed by parliament. A specialised office for corruption and organised crime, USKOK, was created in late 2001, and its reach was demonstrated on the office that created it: in November 2012 a Croatian court sentenced Ivo Sanader, prime minister from 2003 to 2009, to ten years in prison for taking bribes, a case he argued against as politically motivated.

Why Croatia rebuilt its counties after independence

Croatia was first divided into counties in the Middle Ages, and the map of them moved with the Ottoman conquest, the recapture that followed, and the changing status of Dalmatia, Dubrovnik and Istria. The traditional division was abolished in the 1920s, when the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes introduced oblasts and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia replaced those with banovinas. After 1945 the counties gave way to roughly one hundred municipalities.

Legislation in 1992 brought them back, on new lines. In 1918 the part of Croatia governed from Budapest held eight counties, seated at Bjelovar, Gospić, Ogulin, Požega, Vukovar, Varaždin, Osijek and Zagreb; the 1992 legislation established fifteen counties in that same territory. Croatia has been divided since then into twenty counties plus the City of Zagreb, which holds the legal status of a county and a city at once, with the boundaries last revised in 2006. The counties subdivide into 128 cities and 428 municipalities.

Local elections use two systems at once. County prefects and city and municipal mayors are elected for four-year terms by a majority of the votes cast in the unit, with a runoff where no candidate reaches a majority in the first round. Councils are elected for four-year terms by proportional representation, with the whole local unit forming a single constituency and the councils themselves setting how many members they have. Eight nationwide local elections have been held since 1990. Campaigning stops the day before polling and stays stopped until the polls close at 19:00, when exit polls may be announced, and the same silence applies to every other kind of election in the country.

How Croatia argued its way into the European Union

Accession took twenty-three years from the declaration of independence, and most of the delay was about the war and its aftermath. The last Serb-held territory in eastern Slavonia was returned by negotiation under the Erdut Agreement, which made the area a temporary protectorate of a United Nations transitional administration, and reintegration was completed in 1998. Croatia had joined the Council of Europe in 1996 and the World Trade Organization in 2000, and opened accession negotiations with the European Union in 2003.

Those negotiations stalled twice. The first obstruction was the extradition of Croatian generals to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, including Ante Gotovina, who had gone to ground. The second came from Slovenia, which blockaded the process in 2008 and 2009 over an unresolved border, and was lifted after an agreement signed in late 2009. Negotiations closed on 30 June 2010 with Croatian legislation harmonised with the European Union acquis, the accession treaty was ratified in 2011, a membership referendum was held in 2012, and Croatia became a member state on 1 July 2013.

The security track ran faster. Croatia entered Partnership for Peace in 2000, received an invitation at the Bucharest summit in 2008, and became a full member of NATO on 1 April 2009. Membership of the United Nations dates from 22 May 1992. The euro and the Schengen Area both arrived on 1 January 2023, and the process of joining the OECD began in 2022.

What remains open is mostly the map. Croatia has had unresolved border disputes since the 1990s with Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, which is to say with every neighbour except Hungary. It maintains diplomatic relations with 189 states, beginning with Germany in 1991 and most recently with Liberia in 2024, supported by 57 embassies, 30 consulates and eight permanent missions. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Croatia a flawed democracy in 2023, a classification that sits alongside a constitutional structure which has been rewritten four times by the parliament it created.