A leftist opposition legal scholar will face off against Zagreb’s colorful mayor in Croatia’s presidential runoff elections, the state-run Electoral Commission said early yesterday.
The failure of the ruling conservative party candidate to make the runoff signals Croatians’ growing dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of the economy and charges of high-level corruption.
With nearly all votes counted on Sunday, the commission said Social Democrat lawmaker Ivo Josipovic garnered 32.4 percent of votes and Zagreb Mayor Milan Bandic — who ran as independent candidate — got 14.8 percent of votes.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Because no candidate got more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two finishers must now face each other in a Jan. 10 runoff.
Both candidates are considered pro-Western and both will likely support the ex-Yugoslav country’s efforts to win entry into the EU, possibly in 2011 or 2012.
A professor of international law at the Zagreb Law Faculty and lawmaker since 2003, Josipovic has a largely untainted resume, but even his supporters acknowledge that he suffers from a lack of charisma.
Speaking after the vote, Josipovic, 52, said Croats “had a chance today to choose between justice and injustice, between law and lawlessness, between light and darkness.”
“They obviously have chosen light and I’m sure it will be the same on Jan. 10,” Josipovic said.
Zagreb’s mayor since 2000, the 54-year-old Bandic remains popular despite allegations of political cronyism. Bandic was kicked out of the Social Democrats when he decided to oppose Josipovic in the presidential election.
Following Sunday’s vote, Bandic said the result showed that Croatia “needs a different president, who won’t be affected by any party’s policies.”
Bandic views are often hard to pin down, shifting across the political spectrum. He allowed a nationalist singer to perform at the main square, dismaying many Zagreb residents, but has also supported gay parades, unnerving conservatives.
Bandic also has a more checkered past than his staid rival. In 2002, he fled police after being caught driving drunk.
Local media claim he regularly fixes bids for city work projects, funneling to his aides and overpaying them. He denies the charges, saying there has been no formal investigation launched against him.
The country of 4.5 million joined NATO in April and hopes to enter the EU soon.
Voter’s main concerns during the campaign were the economy and allegations of widespread corruption.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS