From “Zagreb is OURS!” in 2017, to "We Can!” in 2021 - meaning a victory for municipalists and community power in Croatia’s capital city
In October 2017, we posted hereabout a vibrant new municipalist movement in Croatia, titled Zagreb Is OURS! (Zagreb je NAŠ!), who had won 7,6 % of votes (4 seats) in Zagreb City Assembly, 21 seats in city districts and also 41 seats in local councils, in their May 2017 elections. Their aims was “building a new politics based on the principles of wide participation, inclusiveness and openness”.
Nearly four years later, we are delighted to see Open Democracy report that:
The residents of Croatia’s capital, Zagreb, voted for change in May 2021, turning away from a regime that had held power since 2000, whose mayor had been deeply entangled in corruption and clientelism.
Možemo!, which translates as 'We Can!', won 23 out of 47 seats in the City Assembly. The coalition consists of small Left-Green parties, the municipalist initiative Zagreb je NAŠ! (‘Zagreb is Ours!’) and social movements including environmentalists, LGBTQ+ rights activists and trade unions.
Together they have promised “to change the way the city is governed, to return the city to its citizens in politics”.
The new mayor, Tomislav Tomašević, won the first round on 16 May with 45% of the vote before defeating his far-Right populist opponent Miroslav Škoro on Sunday 30 May. Tomašević – who won more than 65% of the second-round vote – became popular during his years of activism, especially against Zagreb's urban crises, which escalated during Milan Bandić's time as mayor.
Great news! And the OD piece also points out how what sits underneath a traditional political party success is a whole range of community-oriented, participatory practice:
Možemo! may appear a traditional political party, but it is constituted in a different manner. It allows as many people as possible to participate in decision-making processes, making proposals and expressing their opinions through local groups and assemblies.
Local assemblies also proved themselves vital in the response to the 2020 earthquake. Compared to traditional parties, people can do this without the barrier of needing to become a member of a party.
Writing for Jacobin Italia, the political scientist Chiara Milan, who specialises in social movements in the Balkans, highlights this point. She compares it to Barcelona En Comú, the team that has been governing the Catalan capital since 2015. Here too, we have a convergence of social movements with a former activist now turned mayor.
She writes, “[In Zagreb] The decision to try the institutional route stemmed from the awareness that the battle in the streets could no longer be the only solution. It was necessary to enter the institutions to transform them from within, while maintaining close contact with the movements that continued to animate the streets and squares.”
Zagreb je NAŠ! has both accrued influence and gained support from municipalist platforms across Europe where people have taken back the city – not least Barcelona En Comú. Mirroring many other places in Europe, especially Hungary and Poland, Croatia has also seen a resurgence in far-Right and populist politics.
Not only did Tomašević face and overwhelmingly defeat a far-Right opponent in the second round of the mayoral election, but Croatia is witnessing escalating attacks against women's rights. This is happening while many politicians are turning a blind eye to the increase in violence currently persecuting the LGBTQ+community.
Zagreb's former mayor, Bandić, sent strong signals in support of this violence, including removing Pride flags and replacing them with Christian anti-abortion ‘Walk for Life’ flags, which symbolise both an attack on abortion rights and feminism more broadly.
By contrast, the new city government has pledged to combat gender-based and sexuality-based violence. Zagreb is now part of a trend in which feminist and municipalist platforms are winning cities for the people in common, which has happened in Grenoble, Amsterdam and Naples.
More here. As this additional piece from Vassilis Petsinis makes clear. Možemo! is modelling itself after the kind of coalitions that came in behind Podemos (“Yes We Can” is the shared definition). But in the context of the particularly pernicious ethnic divisions in the societies of the Balkans, it’s exciting to see the possibility of new kinds of progressive alliances that cut beneath old tribalisms.