Croatia

Homeland Movement

At the 2020 parliamentary elections, most of the right-wing opposition to premier Plenković and the HDZ is united in the newly-formed Homeland Movement (cro: Domovinski pokret) party and coalition, led by nationalist singer and former HDZ MP Miroslav Škoro. Škoro narrowly missed the run-off at the presidential elections after finishing third with almost a quarter of the votes. Two of Škoro’s best known policy proposals were that Croatia should deploy troops at its border with Bosnia and Herzegovina to stop an influx of migrants and that convicted Croatian war criminal Tomislav Merčep should be pardoned. He also vowed to seek an international investigation into the WWII concentration camp Jasenovac and if necessary “dig everything up”.

Although they achieved a very good result for the new party of almost 11% of the vote and 16 members of parliament, they did not gain power and position. Therefore, immediately after the election, there was a division into two parliamentary clubs of the Sovereignists and the Homeland Movement. A few months later, two more MPs left the Homeland Movement. After a heated argument, its founder, Miroslav Škoro, left the party together with his sister.

The Homeland Movement Club has fallen to eight members, four of whom can easily be described as far-right. The most famous among them is Zlatko Hasabegović, who became famous while he was the Minister of Culture for shutting down non-profit media and removing the name of Marshal Tito Square in Zagreb. In the 1990s, he took part in a violent anti-antifa protest, wore an Ustasha hat worn by HOS members at NDH Day celebrations, and wrote for NDH magazine celebrating Ustashas as heroes and martyrs. Their representative is also Ante Prkačin, the war chief of the HOS General Staff, whose unit in BiH was mentioned in the context of war crimes against civilians. He regularly uses the parliamentary rostrum to rehabilitate the Ustasha movement and spread Ustasha mythomania. Ivan Penava and Stipo Mlinaric are MPs from Vukovar, whose entire political program is reduced to spreading hatred towards Serbs.