Croatia, a member of the European Union, hosted a now notorious, pyrotechnic-studded rock concert in its capital city Zagreb in July that drew a crowd of an estimated half million people. Punctuated by a signature World War II fascist-era call-and-response between the performer Marko Perkovic, known as “Thompson,” and his audience, it essentially became the largest far-right gathering in Europe since the Second World War. Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković was even photographed attending a rehearsal beforehand with his children.
This in a country that still tries to position itself as a respected member of the EU and a key proponent of EU enlargement in the Western Balkans. At a recent United Nations Security Council meeting, the Croatian representative said the country “warmly supports” the EU membership aspirations of its neighbor, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Yet in the same meeting, the diplomat pressed for amendments to Bosnia’s election law to give more power to the hardline ethnonationalist Croat party, the HDZ BiH.
The Croatian government’s normalization of the neo-Nazi far-right is intrinsically linked to its undermining of democracy in post-war Bosnia, a country facing secession threats by a Bosnian Serb leader in its worst political crisis in peacetime, one that has profound security risks, given the ethnonationalist partitionist violence that sparked the wars of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The far-right ideology expressed in July’s concert in Croatia and the sentiment reflected in subsequent Nazi graffiti there that went un-condemned by the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) political party were the backbone of the Croatian ethnonationalist war of aggression against central and western Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. Today’s leader of the HDZ’s sister party in Bosnia, the HDZ BiH, is alleged to have requested Bosniaks from Croat-run concentration camps to use as forced labor when he was general director of the Soko factory in the southern Bosnian city of Mostar, an allegation he denies.
Croatia’s normalization of this ideology suggests it may be turning to the dark politics of the past to shape the Western Balkans of today. At the same time, the region has become fertile ground for Russian influence, including the Kremlin’s support of the Bosnian Serb separatist leader, Milorad Dodik, who regularly cooperates with HDZ BiH political figures and endorses their political objectives.
Croatia will be hosting the Three Seas Initiative (3SI) Summit & Business Forum in 2026 on the 10th anniversary of the forum’s founding in its coastal city of Dubrovnik. This will be an opportunity for Zagreb to set agendas on energy and infrastructure in the Western Balkans and potentially whitewash its record of propping up far-right sectarian politics in Bosnia by presenting itself as a bridge-builder between EU and non-EU Western Balkans states.
July’s Concert: Echoes of Croatia’s Fascist Past
To understand the significance of July’s far-right concert, it’s helpful to examine the evolution of fascist and racial ideologies in Croatia since the period of the Second World War. Between 1941 and 1945, a swath of territory encompassing most of modern-day Croatia, all of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and some parts of modern-day Serbia and Slovenia fell under the rule of the nationalist, fascist Ustaše regime. Aligned with the Nazis, the regime was founded on a racial ideology according to which Croats were “authentic white Europeans” and Serbs, Jews, and Roma were selected for extermination. The violent and racial worldview of the regime was embodied in the atrocities committed at the infamous Jasenovac concentration camp, where between 77,000 and 99,000 people were murdered – most of them Serbs, Jews, and Roma. Jasenovac was a unique death camp of the Second World War, in that it was run and managed by the Ustaše independently of the Nazi regime, with little German involvement.
During the period of Tito’s rule in Socialist Yugoslavia — the federation created in 1945 out of the defeat of fascist forces by Tito’s Partisans — the promotion of fascism was strictly prohibited, and the circulation of symbolism relating to the Ustaše regime could lead to prosecution and even imprisonment. When Yugoslavia collapsed in the 1990s, these prohibitions fell with them, as ethnonationalist strongmen took control of State apparatuses. In Croatia, the then-newly elected president, Franjo Tuđman, and his HDZ party began revising long-held narratives of the fascist Ustaše regime and its atrocities. One of his party’s unfounded claims was that communist Yugoslavia had exaggerated the crimes committed by the Ustaše regime.
It was at this time that Tuđman met with Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milošević, to discuss carving up multiethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina between them. In 1992, the HDZ government in Croatia sponsored a military assault against Western and Central BiH via its Bosnian Croat proxy, the Croatian Defence Council (HVO). The HVO worked together with Croatia’s armed forces to seize territory in Bosnia and Herzegovina for an ethnically homogenous Croat statelet. This brutal military campaign created prison camps that became the first concentration camps on European soil since the Holocaust. The trial of the case The Prosecutor v. Prlić at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) noted that HVO soldiers forced Bosnian Muslim detainees to sing Ustaše songs in order to cover up the screams of their fellow detainees who were being tortured. The HVO had absorbed another Croat paramilitary group, the Croatian Defence Forces (HOS), whose insignia included the World War Two Ustaše slogan, “For the Homeland – Ready” – the same call-and-response that Thompson used with his audience at the rock concert in Zagreb this year. During its assault on Bosnia, the HVO was financed directly from the Croatian government budget as it massacred Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs, burned Bosnian Muslims alive in their homes, and ran a complex of concentration camps including Dretelj and Heliodrom.
Thirty years on from these Ustaše-inspired atrocities, the glorification of the ideology’s symbols has returned with the apparent full support of the Croatian administration. The musician Thompson is a veteran of Croatia’s own war of independence from the former Yugoslavia, in which Milošević’s Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) used military force to try to prevent Croatia’s exit from the federation. He has a long history of promoting Ustaše symbolism and attracting far-right audiences that proudly use Nazi salutes, drawing criticism from organizations including the Anti-Defamation League. He has been banned in several European countries, including Switzerland and the Netherlands, for promoting Ustaše symbolism.
Thompson’s concert included a performance of his infamous “Čavoglave Battalion” song, which begins with the lyric “For the homeland – ready!”, the World War Two Ustaše slogan that is synonymous with the Nazi greeting “Sieg Heil.” Despite condemnation of the concert from the EU Commission, the Union’s executive branch, Plenković has doubled down on his appearance there: “I was happy that I was there […] As Prime Minister, it was in my interest to see how preparations for the event were going.”
The EU has the power to freeze funds to member States to enforce compliance with the rule of law. The 2020 conditionality regulation added to its so-called rule of law toolkit established a direct link between respect for the rule of law and access to EU funds. Moreover, it does not need unanimous support among member States to be enacted. The EU has used this instrument to freeze funds to Hungary and Poland, for example. Despite the Croatian government participating in and normalizing pro-Nazi ideological expressions that are illegal under Croatian law, the EU has yet to put such pressure on Plenković’s administration.
Exporting Ethnonationalism to Bosnia and Herzegovina
Even as Croatia has slipped back into nationalism and far-right ideology for years, its ruling HDZ has faced allegations of undermining Bosnia’s sovereignty, including by three former high representatives, a position created to oversee the civilian implementation of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that formally ended the war in Bosnia.
A critical example of this interference is the aftermath of Bosnia’s October 2018 election for its tripartite presidency, which under the constitution drafted as part of the Dayton Accords must be composed of elected representatives of Bosnia’s three major ethnic groups – Bosniaks (Muslims), Croats, and Serbs. (That in itself has been found illegal by the European Court of Human Rights because it disenfranchises voters who don’t identify as part of one of those three groups.) When a moderate Bosnian Croat candidate from a civic-oriented party beat the HDZ BiH candidate for the Croat seat, Croatia’s HDZ joined its sister party in pressing for changes in Bosnia’s election laws that would restore and entrench their dominance. Croatia’s Chargé d’Affaires Hrvoje Curic Hrvatinic pressed his country’s position that only a changed Bosnian electoral system could ensure that Croats could reliably elect “their legitimate representative” to the three-person BiH Presidency. His position implied that only hardline ethnonationalist Croats rather than civic-oriented politicians are fit to represent Bosnian Croat voters, regardless of how they actually vote.
This came to a head during the October 2022 election, when High Representative Christian Schmidt ordered a change to the electoral law to do exactly that — right as ballots were being counted. The changes were widely denounced by civil society, including the Bosnian Advocacy Center, which asserted they constituted “apartheid for Bosniaks [Bosnian Muslims].” Meanwhile, the Croatian government and its proxy HDZ BiH publicly framed it a resounding success.
Now, Croatia’s government is once more calling for further electoral law reforms in Bosnia, again for the “benefit of the rights and interests of the Croat people” and Bosnia’s purported “European path.” This follows a meeting between Plenković and HDZ BiH leaders, and comes as the EU considers whether or not to release up to 917 million euros to BiH as part of the Union’s Growth Plan for the Western Balkans.
The underlying objective of the HDZ BiH is the creation of a third “entity” in Bosnia, which under the Dayton Agreement has been divided into a Serb-majority Republika Srpska and a Muslim-Croat entity known as the Federation. Such calls for partition are in the spirit of recent partitionist attempts by Dodik, the Bosnian Serb separatist leader, who has expressed his support for the HDZ BiH’s calls for a third entity. So when Plenković calls for further electoral “reforms” in neighboring Bosnia, it prompts the question of Croatia’s end goal.
As in the 1990s, Bosnia finds itself again in the crosshairs of a two-pronged attack on its sovereignty – politically for now, but with the risk of an outbreak of violence always present. As then, Serb and Croat ethnonationalists are attempting to carve BiH into fragments, just through different means. Though the United States recently lifted sanctions against Dodik, EU sanctions remain and his tenure as Republika Srpska leader looks as good as over in the wake of his ban from public office. Meanwhile, Bosnian Croat ethnonationalists have the full weight of EU member State Croatia behind them, while the EU appears to be staying largely silent.
