As nationalism moves into the mainstream and the left struggles to respond, Croatia’s largest party is solidifying its support by aligning itself with a conservative rock star.
When Croatian rock singer Marko Perkovic “Thompson” took to the stage last summer for what has been declared the largest concert the world has ever seen, he faced a massive crowd of controversy head-on.
Thompson performed, among other songs, Bojna Cavoglave (Cavoglave Battalion), which he penned as a young soldier defending his home village against rebel Serb forces in the early months of the 1991-95 Croatian War of Independence. A rallying cry at the time, the wartime song is today a lightning rod for division due to its use of a banned, World War II-era slogan embraced by the Nazi-backed Ustashe regime.
Many fans of the 59-year-old singer, who got his stage name from the American submachine gun he used to carry, embrace the song’s opening lyrics, too. Thompson’s shouts of “Za dom” (For the Homeland), were met enthusiastically with chants of “Spremni!” (Ready!) by the crowd of some half a million people – some of whom openly displayed Ustashe symbols.
The spectacle, which organizers claimed was the largest ticketed one-day event in history, predictably attracted the spotlight.
A day before the concert at Zagreb’s Hippodrome, Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic had attended the general rehearsal, meeting and taking pictures with Thompson. During the show itself, several high-ranking members of Plenkovic’s ruling Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, HDZ) were seen chanting along with the crowd. And afterward, Croatia’s head of government brushed off the singer’s use of the Ustashe chant, saying it was “an integral part of Thompson’s repertoire.”
Center-left and left-wing opposition parties and some media were mortified, questioning how such an event could take place on city-owned land in the capital of the EU’s newest member state.
But as it turned out, it was just the first of a string of recent public displays of Croatian nationalism, including several military parades and hooligan attacks on minority-Serb cultural events in Zagreb and Split.
Thomspon welcomed the New Year with a concert at Zagreb Arena, and then – amid growing dissension – he returned to the national stage. This time, in Zagreb’s central square, he led another massive crowd in celebrating the Croatian national team’s bronze medal in the 2026 European Men’s Handball Championship.
Right-Wing Cultural Offensive
Even before Thompson’s summer concert, which one commentator called a “neo-fascist Croatian Woodstock,” there was a clear societal divide: those who were going, and those who were not. And Prime Minister Plenkovic, a constant media presence and the country’s most recognizable government member according to a recent survey, made clear where he stood.
By cozying up to Thompson, Plenkovic essentially gave the green light to right-wing and far-right groups to express their stances more openly, according to Stevo Djuraskovic, assistant professor at the Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb.
“Since then, we have had a kind of right-wing cultural offensive, which Plenkovic has tacitly accepted,” Djuraskovic said.
This offensive plays on decades-old societal divisions, specifically on the dichotomy between the Ustashe (fascists) and Partisans (communists) – dating all the way back to World War II – and has put the Croatian left in a position where it is scrambling for answers.
Karin Roginer Hofmeister – a post-doctoral researcher at Charles University’s Faculty of Social Sciences in the Czech Republic – said that the right is capitalizing from what she calls “assertive memory politics.”
This populist approach, which Roginer Hofmeister said is evident across the post-Yugoslav region, relies on historical narratives that are “less apologetic, less inclusive, and more centered on one’s own victimhood and pride.”
The Croatian right has flourished in this environment, enjoying stable levels of popularity at around 40 percent overall since the 2024 parliamentary elections. Numbers like that can be attributed in part to its successful effort to paint the left simply as communists.
“In the post-Yugoslav countries, communists often function as a symbol of the ultimate evil: ‘the dungeon of nations,’ suppression of national sovereignty, and, in the Croatian nationalist narrative specifically, subordination to Belgrade and Serbian dominance,” remarked Roginer Hofmeister.
Explaining the ideological conflict between the right and the left in contemporary Croatia solely in terms of a division into Ustashe and Partisans runs the risk of oversimplification, however. As Djuraskovic put it, this is simply the most salient mobilization tool for both poles of the political spectrum, which, as elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, have formed around those who support conservative views and those who support progressive socio-cultural values.
Thompson’s fans, who overwhelmingly belong to the former camp, appear to be using what they consider patriotic iconography to metaphorically shield themselves against perceived intrusions on traditional values by “woke” foreign influences.
Vjeran Pavlakovic – a full professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka, Croatia – said that the Ustashe versus Partisans dichotomy is, therefore, merely a facade for other, more pressing socio-cultural issues such as education, Church-state relations, abortion, and identity politics.
Broader issues that have emerged more recently throughout the EU are also increasingly shaping Croatians’ idea of left-versus-right. Among these are migration, rising populism, climate change, and freedom of speech, Pavlakovic said.
Two Left Feet
Whatever the main issues are, they are things the country’s left seemingly has no answers to at the moment. This failure, and by extension the failure to project the image of a credible and consistent alternative to the current government, further fuels the right’s stable popularity.
Both of the leading left-wing parties – the Social Democratic Party (Socijaldemokratska partija Hrvatske, SDP) and the new-left We Can! (Mozemo!) party – lack the personnel and ideas to pose a serious challenge to the Plenkovic-led HDZ, says Djuraskovic. The SDP and We Can!, he argued, focus their attention almost exclusively on criticizing the HDZ’s policies and corrupt governing practices, but do not present their own policies clearly enough to voters.
“How exactly are they going to change the structure of the economy?” Djuraskovic said, referring to another pressing issue in the minds of voters. “That will not happen on its own because you stop stealing and start injecting money into the system. The real question is: ‘into what exactly and through which specific measures?’”
Pavlakovic said that there is little policy distinction between the SDP as the country’s largest nominally left-wing party and the HDZ. “Their political programs have de facto been the same: neoliberal capitalism, integration into the EU and NATO, and so on.”
The HDZ was once cast by other right-wing forces and commentators as having drifted too far toward the center under Plenkovic. But in part through its alignment with popular cultural figures like Thompson, the party has been able to reestablish itself as a distinctly right-wing movement, similar to the image it had in the 1990s and again in the mid-2010s under Tomislav Karamarko.
“It is clear that the HDZ profits from relying on patriotism, its ties to the Catholic Church, and anti-left discourse. At the moment, there may be no other right-wing party that can capitalize on these themes, enabling the HDZ to take control of them,” Pavlakovic said.
Crying Foul
The left has made clear that they believe the right’s cultural offensive is incompatible with the anti-fascist foundations on which the modern-day Croatian state was built. SDP leader Sinisa Hajdas Doncic, for example, recently described Plenkovic and the HDZ-led government as extreme right-wing in an interview with the Croatian daily Jutarnji list.
Djuraskovic did not go that far. He said that the HDZ espouses a “light” version of right-wing politics, particularly when compared to the leadership of Karamarko from 2012 to 2016, during which the party radicalized and drifted toward the far-right. Djuraskovic referred to Plenkovic as “Karamarko with a human face” – a nod to the “socialism with a human face” slogan used by Czechoslovak leader Alexander Dubcek during the 1968 Prague Spring.
Much like Karamarko, Plenkovic has successfully co-opted the rightmost factions within his party as well as external right-wing elements, making it possible for the HDZ to maintain broad support. Strategic rapprochement between the HDZ and Plenkovic on one side and prominent right-wing public figures, such as Thompson, on the other have played a large part.
“Thompson benefits from institutional proximity, visibility, and the feeling that he represents ‘the people’ and a ‘correct’ kind of patriotism. The government benefits because Thompson mobilizes a large patriotic public, whose emotional center is the 1990s Homeland War heroic narrative. And that public is electorally important,” Roginer Hofmeister explained.
EU institutions have been notably silent amid the shift to the right in Croatia, which joined in 2013 with an obligation to uphold the bloc’s values and standards.
Djuraskovic suggested that this is partly because Brussels is seeing a right-wing shift in other member states over the past years.
But Roginer Hofmeister said the EU can’t do much about the situation, claiming it “reflects limited institutional competence in symbolic disputes, reduced leverage over a member state, and the fact that the EU is currently focused on larger structural and geopolitical challenges.”
These challenges – including, but not limited to, the war in Ukraine, migration crises, and economic pressures from the U.S. and China – make the EU somewhat reluctant to intervene in a way that would weaken one of its most loyal member states, according to Pavlakovic.
With the left flailing as it seeks a way to counter the right’s offensive, and with no elections scheduled until 2028, it appears that there will be no major changes to the constellation of political forces in Croatia in the near future.
Some of Thompson’s most ardent followers believe that he might be the man to change that – with one respondent to a survey by the news website Dnevno.hr saying that “he brings people together” and could make a run for office and perhaps someday be prime minister.
But Roginer Hofmeister had her doubts.
“I think that Thompson’s more likely ambition is to remain a para-political authority – someone who shapes the emotional boundaries of patriotism and pressures institutions from outside formal politics.”
Such a role appears to be economically profitable for Thompson and his management team. According to unofficial estimates, the Hippodrome concert alone generated around 25 million euros in ticket revenue, and with another concert season approaching, there are clear incentives to keep the singer on stage.
Andrej Grgin is an editorial intern at Transitions. He has a master’s degree in Balkan, Eurasian, and Central European Studies from Charles University in Prague, Czechia.
