Great Friends of the Croatian Far Right

After the Homeland Movement (DP) became part of the ruling coalition, it first attacked the independent media because of its allegedly "anti-Croatian agenda." The same media exposed the DP leaders as those with questionable asset declarations and finances who cooperate with the right wing from neighboring countries, which has pretensions to Croatian territory.

After the last elections for the Croatian Parliament in April 2024 and the elections for representatives in the European Parliament, the far-right party Homeland Movement (DP) and their MEP Stjepo Bartulica, a publicly declared member of the Catholic organization Opus Dei, received much media attention. The Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) lost its majority and found a new coalition partner in the Homeland Movement. In its program, the party wishes to forcibly change history by revising the historical school curriculum, textbooks, and museums. It has a clear idea of what kind of media they want: “Croatized, traditional and Christian worldview.” They blame the current press for the “demographic disaster” because “they are under the influence of Serbs and neo-Yugoslav personnel.”

One of the main targets of the Homeland Movement is the weekly newspaper Novosti, which is financed by the council of the Serbian minority in Croatia and the largest Internet portal Index.hr. Index has published a series of articles that point to the dubious finances of the members of the Homeland Movement and the large holes in their asset declarations. Novosti investigated the connection of the Homeland Movement and its members to the extreme right in Italy, Hungary, and Serbia through various global right-wing, conservative, and fundamentalist organizations. As a result, the Homeland Movement announced the termination of funding for the weekly Novosti as one of its primary goals.

Stjepo Bartulica announced on the far-right Bujica talk show, which for years has functioned as a media branch of the Homeland Movement and a stage for the hate speech of its leaders and is led by neo-Nazi Velimir Bujanec that he will become a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, where Giorgia Meloni from Italy plays a leading role.

Brothers from Italy

The main European partners of the Homeland Movement and their MEP, Stjepo Bartulica, thus became the Brothers of Italy, a party led by individuals who planned armed aggression against Croatia in the 1990s and now march through the streets of Italian cities bearing the sign “Istria, Fiume, Dalmazia – terre d’Italia.” This slogan of the Italian right shows that it does not give up at least symbolic claims to the Croatian coastal territory.

Pictured above is Stefano Cavedagna, the spokesperson for the National Youth. He became a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Brothers of Italy. He has organized marches in Bologna for years, each with an identical banner at the head of the procession: "Istria, Rijeka, Dalmatia—Terre D’Italia." Photo: Facebook/Galeazzo Bignami — Pictured above is Stefano Cavedagna, the spokesperson for the National Youth. He became a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Brothers of Italy. He has organized marches in Bologna for years, each with an identical banner at the head of the procession: “Istria, Rijeka, Dalmatia—Terre D’Italia.” Photo: *Facebook/Galeazzo Bignami*

In December 2023, the leaders of the Croatian far-right Most party and the Croatian Sovereignists, together with the representative of the Homeland Movement, Stjepo Bartulica, were guests in Rome at the right-wing festival Atreju, where one of the speakers was the Italian neo-fascist senator Roberto Menia. Roberto Menia, a member of the Brothers of Italy, went to Belgrade in 1991 to negotiate the division of Dalmatia region with the regime of Slobodan Milošević and paramilitary forces. The Italian Social Movement (MSI), on whose behalf Menia visited Belgrade, the same organization in which Meloni was a youth member, received Serbian Chetniks in Italy in the middle of the war in Croatia. From their office in Trieste, where Menia also operated, they claimed that from that city they “coordinate relations between Serbs and 300,000 Dalmatian and Istrian exiles”.

The festival of the right of Atreju is an excellent metaphor of the ideology carried out by the Brothers of Italy in recent years. On the international level, Croatian guests, like-minded people like Bartulica, serve as allies in the fight against liberal democracy. But to this party, Croats are often barbarians who occupied their “eastern borders”. For the purposes of internal voter mobilization, the Brothers of Italy increasingly practice anti-Croatian irredentism.

The Serbian Connection

Stjepo Bartulica was appointed to the advisory board of the organization Political Network of Values. Political Network of Values is a defacto copy of the Agenda Europe network, a lobbying network composed of several hundred of the most powerful ultra-conservative organizations and political movements, linked to the American far-right and Russian propagandists Konstantin Malofeev, Alexey Komov, Pavel Parfentiev, who from 2013 to 2019 jointly worked to undermine women’s and gay rights.

Brian Brown, another member of the Agenda Europe network, is also on their board of directors. Brown is the president of the International Organization for the Family (IOF) and their main project, the World Congress of Families (WCF), which gathers under its umbrella the world’s most influential ultra-religious organizations, including the Serbian Dveri. Brown has been working on the international promotion of the Dveri movement for a decade. In September 2023, he was a guest at the European Congress of Families in Dubrovnik, one of the largest gatherings of the far-right in Europe. Thus, Croatian right-wingers who thrive on spreading hatred towards Serbs found themselves under a common umbrella with the Serbian far-right, which glorified war criminals and appropriate Croatian territories.

Great Friends in Hungary

“Just a political victory over the radical and globalist left is not enough, we also need a victory over culture! For that victory, we will need even more courage. The future depends on culture, and the left realized that a long time ago. Conservative forces across Europe are growing! No we must surrender in the fight against gender ideology, the redefinition of human nature and the destruction of the family! It was an honor to speak at the CPAC conference in Budapest. Always and everywhere, Croatia first!” said Stjepo Bartulica from Hungary in April 2024, about the conference of the most prominent figures of the European and American far-right.

Host and co-organizer of the CPAC event in Budapest, the Center for Fundamental Rights, openly advocates for the concept of a Greater Hungary, which the Trianon Agreement reduced in 1920, when, among other things, the Croatian Littoral region, the headquarters of Croatia and Slavonia were left. The Center for Fundamental Rights also published a geographical map of Hungary in a package, with Croatian provinces included. Thanks to the generous subsidies from Orbán’s budget, they have been running a months-long campaign of their anti-Croatian work, encouraging Hungarian citizens to spread the described visuals and associated irredentism.

Two years ago, Bartulica hosted members of the Center for Fundamental Rights leadership at a summer school for the education of young conservatives in Split. The president of the Homeland Movement, Ivan Penava, was also there. Last year, he brought their international coordinator to Zagreb to speak at the international conservatism conference. And then, a month ago, he took a picture with Orbán in the middle of Budapest.

This is how we got an absurd situation where the Homeland Movement, while accusing the media of exposing their connections with right-wing movements that publicly show pretensions to Croatian territories, accuses the same media of “anti-Croatian” and activity and threaten to shut them down.