The Croatian Democratic Union (, HDZ) is a major conservative, centre-right political party in Croatia. It is one of the two major contemporary political parties in Croatia, along with the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SDP). It is currently the largest party in the Sabor with 62 seats. The HDZ governed Croatia from 1990 before the country gained independence from Yugoslavia until 2000 and, in coalition with junior partners, from 2003 to 2011, and since 2016. The party is a member of the European People's Party (EPP). The HDZ's leader, Andrej Plenković, is the current Prime Minister of Croatia, having taken office following the 2016 parliamentary election.
History
Origins
The HDZ was founded on 17 June 1989 by Croatian dissidents led by Franjo Tuđman. It was officially registered on 25 January 1990. The HDZ held its first convention on 24–25 February 1990, when Franjo Tuđman was elected its president. When the party was founded, the government of the Socialist Republic of Croatia had just introduced a multi-party system in Croatia and scheduled elections for the Croatian Parliament.
The HDZ began as a nationalist party but also included former partisans and members of the Communist establishment, such as Josip Manolić and Josip Boljkovac. President Tuđman and other HDZ officials traveled abroad and gathered large financial contributions from Croatian expatriates. On the eve of the 1990 parliamentary elections, the ruling League of Communists of Croatia saw such tendencies within the HDZ as an opportunity to remain in power. At the beginning of democracy the communists called HDZ "the party of dangerous intentions". The HDZ won a majority in the Croatian Parliament, and Croatia (then part of Yugoslavia) became one of the few socialist countries where Communist single party rule was replaced by anti-Communist single party rule. 30 May 1990, the day the HDZ formally took power, was celebrated as Statehood Day.
1990–2000
A presidential election was held in 1992, and Tuđman, who would remain as undisputed party leader until his death in 1999, was elected president.
The party governed Croatia throughout the 1990s and under its leadership, Croatia became independent (1991), was internationally recognized (1992), and consolidated all of its pre-war territory (by 1998). During that period, the HDZ won both the 1992 and 1995 parliamentary elections.
As it strongly advocated Croatian independence, the HDZ was quite unpopular with the Serb minority and others who preferred to see Croatia remain inside the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This was one of the factors contributing to the creation of the Republic of Serbian Krajina and the subsequent armed conflict in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina. The role of the HDZ in those events is matter of controversy, even in Croatia, where some tend to view HDZ policy in the early stages of the conflict as extremist and a contributing factor in the escalation of violence while others (such as Marko Veselica's Croatian Democratic Party) see the HDZ as having appeased Serbia and the Yugoslav People's Army, therefore being responsible for Croatia's unpreparedness for defense. However, the policies of Tuđman and the HDZ shifted according to the circumstances.
Transition to capitalism
The HDZ also began to lead Croatia toward a political and economic transition from socialism to capitalism. Notably, HDZ governments implemented privatization in the country in a manner that critics consider sub-optimal, and at times possibly illegal, due to the selective nature of the privatizations (see Croatian privatization controversy). According to the HDZ, this process proved a useful distraction from dealing with the baggage of post-World War II communist nationalizations. It was the HDZ in 1992 which enacted into law the right of corporations (the vast majority of which were under state ownership) the right to finally formally register themselves as the owners of nationalized property, thus completing their version of a process of quasi-nationalization started by the communist regime after WWII, in different targeted areas for their gain. Property returned included possessions nationalized from the Catholic Church or widely known individuals such as Gavrilović, the owner of a major meat-producing factory in Petrinja, south of Zagreb.