Background
The term of the existing Chamber of Representatives was to expire one year later, in 1996. However, Croatian government of Franjo Tudjman and his Croatian Democratic Union party hoped to exploit national euphoria over the success of Operation Storm. Chamber of Representatives was quickly dissolved, but not before passing yet another piece of electoral legislation, introducing new voting system which was to improve chances of ruling party.
According to the new electoral law, 28 seats were won in individual constituencies on First past the post basis, while 80 seats were to be distributed on the basis of proportional representation, with the threshold being raised from previous 2% to 5%.
Another addition was raised threshold for lists of party coalitions - 8% for coalition of two parties and 11% for coalition of three and more parties. It is more than obvious that the new rules were introduced to discourage coalitions of small opposition parties and subsequently have their votes dispersed and wasted below the threshold, allowing stronger party to get additional seats.
While 12 seats were kept for Croatian expatriates, number of seats reserved for ethnic minorities have changed. This was most evident in case of Serbs, who had only 3 seats compared with previous 11.
Under such conditions, Croatian opposition parties were more concerned about their own political survival than actually challenging ruling party. Learning from their mistakes during 1992 elections, they created ad hoc coalitions and circumvented electoral thresholds by fielding other parties' members as their won candidates on the lists.
In the end, HDZ won roughly the same percentage of votes and same number of seats as three years earlier. More significant changes were among the ranks of Croatian opposition. Social Democratic Party of Croatia re-emerged as significant political factor with 8.93% votes, at the expense of Croatian Social Liberal Party which had its share of votes nearly halved. Both parties, however, were not as successful as large opposition coalition which included Croatian Peasant Party, Croatian People's Party and Istrian Democratic Assembly.
The most tense moment of the campaign occurred during the vote count. It appeared that Croatian Party of Rights would fail to break 5% threshold, only for the vote to mysteriously increase afterwards.
The election was held in conjunction with special elections for Zagreb City Assembly, which resulted with Zagreb Crisis.
Read more about this topic: Croatian Parliamentary Election, 1995
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