Ivan Blazevic from the Green-left coalition Solidarna from the Republic of Croatia, which won the local elections in Zagreb and Tomashevic became the mayor, spoke about the black propaganda that right-wing candidate Shkoro led against Tomashevic, at CIVIL’s debate “Black propaganda against civil society”. 

“In regards to the pre-election campaign, particularly the second round, Miroslav Shkoro in that campaign used already seen methods, especially in Serbia, Hungary, Poland, which actually is a hub for those rightist movements, which are primarily based on religious fundamentalism and extremism.  

Current mayor Tomashevic has spent a good part of his time in the civil sector, while the messages from the pre-election black campaign of the opponent candidate were that he had not had a single day of work experience, that the civil sector consists of foreign mercenaries from Soros, that the civil sector lives on state feeding-boxes.

Seven days before the second election round, Shkoro came out with a list of several civil society organizations that supposedly had been connected with Tomashevic, using methods like they had been supposedly connected to Tomashevic. In the end, they collected the total revenue of all the organizations and posted a screenshot from the Excel document. And so in several days the shown number of NGOs grew multiple times … and hence forcing the story of foreign mercenaries.  

The NGOs did not respond to this in a coordinated manner and I think that civil society could have used this, but they did not.  

The campaign also had fake surveys that were presented as representative that had been financed by Shkoro.  

In Croatia, fundamentalists that are financed both from Russia and the US are quite strong. The Russian interest is also a religious one, but mostly to cause disorder throughout Europe and the EU countries, to create an alternative civil society, whereas the US ones are mostly religious-evangelical.  

Translation: N. Cvetkovska