Croatia

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Croatia is a country in southeastern Europe, made famous by jaw-dropping women and a strangely overachieving national football team. The chow is something else, too, apparently.

It was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until 1918, part of the kingdom of Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes from 1918 to 1929, which then became Yugoslavia after 1929. During World War II, the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia and divided it among themselves, setting Croatia up to become an "independent" (read: Nazi puppet) country under the rule of the Ustaše, an extreme-right fascist quisling political party which promptly gave large parts of the country to Italy. Among other things, the Ustaše conducted an extermination policy against Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, Roma and anti-Ustase Croats, most infamously with the Jasenovac death camp. In 1945, with Tito's communist Partisans achieving military victory in Yugoslavia, the several parts of Yugoslavia were reunited as a single country. This lasted until 1991 when, with the Yugoslavian government on the verge of falling apart, Croatia and Slovenia declared themselves independent of Yugoslavia. An attempt by the federal Yugoslav government to militarily invade and forcibly reunite Croatia with Yugoslavia fell through after civil war erupted in Bosnia and Herzegovina over whether to also become an independent nation or remain with Yugoslavia, and Yugoslav troops turned their attention there and effectively let Croatia go their own way. All in all, the war in Croatia still took well over 20,000 lives, mind. Not to mention the displaced, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

As of 2009, Croatia is a NATO member state and EU membership kicked in on July 1st, 2013.

[edit] Political parties

  • Social Democratic Party: More or less the Croatian equivalent of the Democratic Party, but traditionally fiscally conservative. The SDP is current ruling party as of 2013, and is often considered to be incompetent but law-abiding.
  • Croatian Democratic Union: A less fiscally conservative equivalent of the Republican Party. Spent much of the first two decades after Croatian independence in power, before losing the 2011 election after many corruption scandals. At present facing trial for using large amounts of state money to fund party activities and purchase flashy new cars for the party elite.
  • Croatian Laburists: a left wing party similar to socialist party in Ireland, primary focus is worker rights and anti - neoliberalism
  • Croatian People's Party: Views similar to the SDP, but more fiscally conservative.
  • Croatian Party of Right(s): Populist right-wingers. Internal feuds have resulted in there being several parties with some variation of the name e.g. "Croatian Pure Party of Rights," "Croatian Party of Rights 1861."
  • HRAST: A right wing party. Anti-gay, anti-EU, anti-abortion, extremely religious.


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