Party Regulation and the Party System in Croatia

The paper brings review of the state legislation concerning political parties, their organization and party finance in Croatia from 1990 to 2012 and examines its direct and indirect impacts on party organization development and party system in the country. Although the first party law was in action already for the first founding elections in 1990, neither the original law nor its subsequent changes have played any significant role in the way how the Croatian parties have been organized. It is similarly hard to detect any direct impact on the party competition and the party system itself. Despite rather frequent changes of the law, it is clear that political elites used the legislative mechanism to verify the existing organizational practice and not to set any more ambitious policy towards functioning of parties. However, the only element of the law with the crucial impact on the party system was assurance of the stable public funding of the parties. More recently, regulation of the party finance, under the pressure from EU and the civic society organizations in the country, was broaden and encompassed also private funding rules and regulations. Although the legislation affected the presidential elections in 2005 and 2010 as well as the parliamentary elections in 2007 and 2011 and raised the intensity of the institutional and public control of party finance during election campaigns, the law in the same time pushed some of the actors towards borderline of the legal actions. Currently, there are several judicial processes opened in front of the Croatian courts in which the former prime minister as well as the HDZ, the ruling party from 2003 to 2011., are accused for illegal funding of the party by the public money.