April the 18th, 2024 – Precisely how many votes did each of the Croatian parties need? A look at each as the Croatian elections end.
As Index vijesti writes, the unofficial results after the results of almost all polling stations have been processed, according to media calculations, show that HDZ has convincingly the Croatian parliamentary elections. It has won 61 mandates. But what about the other Croatian parties?
Rijeke Pravde (Rivers of Justice) which is in essence SDP got 42 mandates. Domovinski Pokret (Homeland Movement) has come third with 14 mandates won. Most (Bridge) has won 11 and Mozemo! (We Can!) has won 10 mandates. IDS and Nezavisna platform Sever won two mandates each, and the Fokus-Republika coalition won one.
The Croatian parliamentary elections showed one very interesting thing, which is that there are still large discrepancies about how many votes are needed by respective Croatian parties in order to secure one mandate. The reason for this lies in the constituencies, that is, in the fact that they are simply not very well balanced. Roughly speaking, this means that in units that consist of larger urban centres, where there are more people, more votes are needed to win a mandate.
In units with a smaller population, fewer votes are needed by Croatian parties in order to secure a mandate. This worked in HDZ’s favour before, but now, as it turns out, even after HDZ’s minimal corrections of constituencies, the situation isn’t much better. HDZ needed an average of slightly less than 12,000 votes for one mandate. On the other side of the spectrum is Fokus, which won only one mandate with a massive 47,712 votes.
Croatian parties and coalitions don’t enjoy equal support across all regions of Croatia, so a scenario is possible in which one party gets a total of more votes at the state level, but fewer mandates.
For example, Mozemo! was successful in three different Zagreb units (1st, 2nd and 6th) and won a total of 7 mandates there. Domovinski Pokret won 4 mandates, and Most won 3. Mozemo received approximately 100,000 votes in 3 units. At the same time, DP won 9 mandates across four constituencies, two in Slavonia (4th and 5th) and two in Dalmatia (9th and 10th) for a similar number of total votes.
Most, on the other hand, won 4 mandates in the 9th and 10th units with slightly less than 50,000 votes, while Mozemo! was left without a mandate in those areas. Therefore, more individual votes received by Mozemo! in Zagreb didn’t mean much at all in the final distribution because Most and DP won more mandates with fewer votes in other units.
