Executive Summary This paper explores the complexity of the situations and the motivations of new civil society actors in Croatia, at the end of May 2016. Parliamentary elections in the Republic of Croatia in November 2015, after four years of a liberal government, resulted with no party or coalition receiving a majority. As it played out, a coalition of independent lists of city mayors, composed just before the elections, received enough votes to hold the balance of power between the two major parties. In January 2016, and after two months of negotiations, this group established a government coalition with the nationalist-oriented, Croatian Democratic Party, HDZ1. In the aftermath of this political shift in January 2016, most civil society actors experienced a worsening of their situation. Not-for-profit actors and Croatian civil society experienced interference regarding what they could legitimately claim as the values they pursue, their organisational functioning and their resources. Today, instead of developing new models of co-use and co-governance of public infrastructure and common goods, civil society now has to fight to preserve any such cooperation models that already exist.2 In research conducted on civil society in Croatia over recent years, the idea of three waves of activism has been proposed. The last of the three waves refers to a shift from liberal conceptions of human rights and conflict resolution to the deep structural deficiencies of the particular form of capitalism developed in Croatia. 3 For the first time, issues of direct democracy, innovative democratic processes and structures, and democratisation of governance in the public sector have been put in the wider context of Croatian social development. This has resulted in the emergence of many new initiatives and organisations in Croatian civil society. It is against this backdrop that civic actors in Croatia are once again confronted with having to defend hard won rights and with having to build a strong popular social movement that respects the concerns of local
17
1
http://hdz.hr
2
http://civic-forum.eu/en/civic-space/croatian-governments-triple-attack-onautonomous-media-civil-society-and-culture
3
Paul Stubbs, Networks, Organizations, Movements: Narratives and Shapes of Three Waves of Activism in Croatia, 2013, original scientific paper.
Matija Mrakovčić was born in Croatia in 1984. She holds an MA in Croatian Language and Comparative Literature, and is a graduate of the Faculty of Law at Zagreb University. Her experience in media work started in 1994 and now she works as a journalist and editor at the non-profit web portal www. kulturpunkt.hr. She works in Association Kurziv – Platform for Matters of Culture, Media and Society on some of the association’s programmes connected with informal education and documentation and historicisation of the Croatian independent cultural scene. She writes about the regional independent cultural scene, civil society organisations, media, contemporary culture, education policies, and collaborates with organisations and initiatives in Croatia, the region and Europe. www.kulturpunkt.hr