At the election of members to representative bodies of local and regional self-government units, held on May 15, 2005 citizens of the Republic of Croatia were electing the members of 426 municipal and 123 city councils and the members of 20 county assemblies as well as the Assembly of the City of Zagreb at 3,914 polling stations in the Republic of Croatia.
At the election of members to representative bodies of local and regional self-government units, held on May 15, 2005 citizens of the Republic of Croatia were electing the members of 426 municipal and 123 city councils and the members of 20 county assemblies as well as the Assembly of the City of Zagreb at 3,914 polling stations in the Republic of Croatia. The election was held for the total of 8,377 members of councils and assemblies and 63,717 candidates were listed in 3,914 candidacy lists. Each municipality, city and county was one constituency. Elections were held using proportional system, with the threshold of 5%. 4,015,832 voters were registered in voters’ lists.
The elections of members to representative bodies of local and regional self-government units were monitored by 1000 GONG observers allocated to the same number of polling stations and 105 mobile teams that visited additional 1500 polling stations, which covered in total around 40% of all polling stations in Croatia.
GONG’s general assessment is that the elections were conducted in accordance with the election legislation although there were some problems with violations of election procedures by some polling committees. The level of polling commissions’ professionalism and understanding of the election procedures ranged from satisfactory to very good, with certain exceptions. Irregularities that were noticed were successfully removed in cooperation with election administration bodies. Violations of legal regulations on election silence by certain political parties and independent lists were surprising.
Due to the lack of regulations that govern election campaign financing, election process is not completely transparent, and due to a number of imprecise provisions of the election law, there was no legal security of candidates at the election.
Having in mind that the legal framework has remained the same, with only minor changes, we cannot provide a positive assessment of the election process in the Republic of Croatia, regardless of the quality of the performance of election committees and the democratic atmosphere in which the election was conducted.
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