Homeland Movement Party faces internal turmoil ahead of intra-party elections

Ahead of the summer break, the President of the Homeland Movement announced that extraordinary intra-party elections would be held at the end of August to elect a new party leadership. However, the news was not well received by all party members.

There is turmoil in the Homeland Movement Party, the junior member of the coalition government. With the party set to hold extraordinary intra-party elections at the end of the month. Yesterday party leaders adopted a decision on the number of party delegates per the party's county chapters, with party president Ivan Penava's Vukovar Srijem County chapter receiving the most delegates, with nine, while others such as Zagreb and Osijek Baranja County will received five and four respectively.

The news was confirmed by a member of the party presidency and the head of the party's Zadar County organization, Damir Biloglav, whose county will only have three delegates. Biloglav said that this decision is in complete contradiction to the agreed to principle that the number of delegates from each county would be determined on the basis of the results achieved at the last parliamentary elections. Biloglav said that the criteria were unclear and un-transparent, and that this was nothing short of rigging the election in Penava’s favour. He further criticized Penava for abruptly and unexpectedly calling the snap election: “Our regular elections are held in February, and the local elections are set as usual for May, so there was plenty of time for us, after we joined this coalition with the HDZ, to see how it's working out. And from the very outset we can see that it is not working out at all. In fact it is working to the detriment of the Homeland Movement, and contrary to the expectations of our party members.”

Biloglav went on to comment on Penava's claim that the intra-party election was part of a process of filtering out the so-called sleepers in the party was still not completed: “The people who need to be filtered out are clearly those who oppose Penava's policy, the policy of an autocrat of Penava.”

He concluded that it is clear that there will be a schism in the party: “It's obvious that there's going to be a schism in the party, because there currently exist two camps of people who simply do not agree on policy issues for some time now. Especially since the coalition with the HDZ was signed. It is with sadness and disappointment that I say this after people spent four years in the field building the party.”

Source: HRT