Political participation of women in Croatia

According to the Croatian Constitution, gender equality is one of the highest values of legal order in Croatia. Article 15 of Gender Equality Act arranges the area concerning the political parties and aims at balancing the place of women and men in bodies of political parties but also on the candidate lists for the parliamentary and local election (for local and regional self-government). National policy for promotion of gender equality is also defining guidelines for achieving the balanced representation of men and women in representative and executive bodies at all levels of government. Additionally, Croatia has established institutional mechanisms for promotion of gender equality in the form of the Office for Gender Equality within the Croatian Government, the Ombudsperson (a woman, actually) for Gender Equality, the local Committees for Gender Equality and the Coordinator for the Gender Equality in the state Government bodies.

The Croatian election system is proportional, which means that the political parties nominate closed candidates’ lists in eleven election precincts and citizens can only choose between the lists and not among candidates. As such, the election system is turning over the responsibility for equal representation on parties themselves as authorized proposers of candidates’ lists. Based on the analysis of the candidates’ lists, together with the election results, we can conclude that parties did not recognise the need for establishing gender equality in politics. Even parties that stipulate their own statutes gender quota did not nominate 40% of women. Some parties have proposed candidates’ lists without any women on them. The Gender Equality Act states that parties should take into account the balanced representation of women and men on candidates’ lists, but since there are not any sanctions provided for not respecting this norm, the parties have ignored it with an excuse that there are not enough women involved in the work of political parties and that they, therefore, could not candidate them.2 But, since the Gender Equality Act is also prescribing that political parties should develop action plans for balancing the representation of women and men in decision making processes and none of the parties has so far developed such a plan, it can be concluded that the primary problem exists in the political parties themselves and that they are not willing to make changes in this area.

In 18 months time local elections will be held in Croatia. Political participation of women on the local level is even lower then on the national level. Women participate in representative bodies of local self-government with only 8 % in municipalities and 15 % in towns and counties. Only 5 % of all municipality, town or county mayors are women. If the trend that was noticed during the parliamentary elections will re-occur on local level, the situation regarding the political participation of women could be even worse after the next local elections. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to make changes in the existing legislation with regard to introducing the obligatory gender quota in a way that it would be impossible to post candidates’ lists that do not include the proportional representation of women.

The model of representative democracy which Croatia should establish according to its constitution cannot be realized if almost half of the society is being excluded from democratic processes. Therefore, additional efforts are necessary in achieving gender equality in decision making processes, through adequate legislation, but also through sensitisation of political parties on the questions regarding gender equality and also by empowering women to exercise their right to participate in decision making processes.

Tajana Broz, project manager 'Women in election 2007', Centre for Education, Counselling and Research

1 So far not a single woman was the President of the Government or of the Parliament in Croatia.

2 Political parties are generally saying that they have about 30% of women inside parties and if these numbers are true, this number presents a higher number of women participating in the work of political parties then the number of women that parties are prepared to candidate.