Croatia’s Prime Minister Looks for Votes From Croats Living in Bosnia

There is no avoiding Ivo Sanader’s glare on Mese Selimovica Boulevard.

With Croatian elections scheduled for Sunday, Nov. 25, the posters of Mr. Sanader, Croatia’s prime minister, line the highway leading into and out of this city. The race, which appears to be close, is likely to determine whose government will take Croatia into the European Union.

And the Croats living in Bosnia could play a big role in that race.

Mr. Sanader’s party in particular is encouraging the large ethnic Croat population here to vote his way in the parliamentary elections. Not long ago, his party seemed sure of re-election, but it is now facing a challenge from the Social Democratic Party.

Bosnia is a natural place for Mr. Sanader’s Croatian Democratic Union to look for support. An estimated 300,000 ethnic Croats live here, and anyone claiming Croatian ethnicity is allowed to vote. Furthermore, Croats here are known for their conservative outlook.

“It’s a public secret that most of the diaspora vote for” the Croatian Democratic Union, said Vanja Skoric, a member of GONG, an election monitoring group in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia.

But the campaign has been criticized by election monitors worried about vote rigging at the more than 100 Croatian polling places planned for Bosnia.

There is also hostility from the Bosnian Muslims, who make up the country’s largest ethnic group and fought against Croats for much of the war that ended in 1995 and who worry about Croatia’s ambitions in the country.

“Sanader’s posters are everywhere,” said one Muslim, Emir Lakaca, 52, who lives just north of Sarajevo. “I’d like to see how the Croats felt if we had posters of Haris Silajdzic all over Zagreb,” he added, referring to Bosnia’s outspoken Muslim leader.

The Croatian government is so eager to solicit votes in Bosnia that it has increased the number of polling places here to 124, from 33 during the last election four years ago. Election monitors say that voting by the Croats here in Croatian elections has been subject to fraud in the past.

In 2003, GONG, the election-monitoring group, said it had found evidence indicating that a number of votes had been falsified. For example, Ms. Skoric said investigators checked out 10 people who were reported to have voted at one polling place and found that 5 had voted, 2 had not and 3 were dead.

“Obviously, Croatia does not yet have the same standards and procedures abroad as within Croatia,” said Suzana Jasic, one of GONG’s election monitoring supervisors.

The governing party has strived to jettison its nationalist image in recent years and to adopt pro-European credentials. But opposition parties accuse it of reverting to the populist methods used during the 1990s under the first Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman.

The conservative party often relies on sports stars to campaign for it. “Sports stars in the 1990s knew that it paid to do what they were told by” the governing party, wrote Tomislav Klauski, a political analyst who works for Vijesti.net, an online news service. “We thought that these things had past.”