Lessons from Croatia: Rule of law and EU enlargement5 min read
Fears that the European Union is not standing up to democratic backsliding in its ranks continue to intensify, as Slovakia joins fellow member state Hungary on an anti-democratic path. Meanwhile, the “waiting room” of EU candidate countries only grows. In the background, Croatia’s rule of law abuses have gone unaddressed in Brussels, sending the wrong signal to aspiring members about the EU’s core values. By pushing back against Croatia’s democratic backsliding, the EU would re-centre the role of rule of law in the enlargement process, paying dividends for candidates from the Western Balkans and further afield.
Without urgent attention from Brussels, Zagreb is at risk of making the Budapest-Bratislava dyad into a triad. Although Croatian democracy has largely stagnated since the country joined the EU in 2013, the “super elections” this April were a turning point.
First, Croatia’s ruling party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), redrew electoral districts to tilt the playing field in its favour. Then, it amended the criminal code to quell media investigations into corruption scandals involving HDZ officials, of which an abundance has been reported. The campaign itself was characterised by public feuding between the prime minister and the president, while HDZ used fake online profiles to attack the opposition. After the elections, HDZ partnered with far-right forces to form a new government, igniting fears that Croatia’s already spotty track record on LGBT+ and reproductive rights will worsen.
Although the Council of Europe rightly voiced concern over the state of media freedoms in Croatia, the EU has yet to address the rule of law setbacks that are hurling the country toward state capture. Prime Minister Andrej Plenković has weakened the Commission for the Prevention of Conflicts of Interest, publicly undermined the European Prosecutor’s Office, and appointed as chief prosecutor a former judge with credible corruption links. Difficulties filling vacancies in other anti-corruption bodies, strikes among court employees, and long waiting times for cases highlight how poorly Croatia’s prosecutorial and judicial systems function. All of this has weakened the public’s already low trust in these institutions, fueled protests, and allowed the accumulation of political and economic power in the hands of the ruling party to go largely unchecked.
Expanding on the rule of law
Once considered a success story of democratic “transition” for the EU, Croatia’s backsliding provides lessons on which institutional reforms are critical for current EU candidate countries and elucidates the somewhat trite call to promote rule of law in those contexts. Given its shared institutional history with other Western Balkan candidate countries formerly part of socialist Yugoslavia, and given that it was the last country to complete the accession process in 2013, the Croatian case indeed carries more weight for prospective members going through the process than the likes of “older” member states like Poland, Hungary, or Slovakia.
Successful enlargement will require not only robust safeguards against corruption in candidates’ judicial systems but also a deeper look into checks and balances across the political system — both tenuous areas for Croatia, even after EU membership.
The appointment of judges, for example, has been a consistent blight on Croatia’s rule of law; a strong first step by several candidate countries in solving this problem has been to initiate judicial vetting processes. Vetting procedures have shown modest success in Albania, where hundreds of judges who were once seen as untouchable have been removed. This new measure, alongside the Specialized Anti-Corruption Structure’s symbolic investigations into the highest political echelons, are building the credibility of new judicial institutions created during Albania’s sweeping justice reforms. Moldova and Ukraine have also included vetting in their wide-reaching anti-oligarchic reforms, to both successes and setbacks.
But new research on the Western Balkans by the University of Oslo’s Nedim Hogić suggests that successful rule of law also requires attention to parliamentary functioning and the separation of powers, not just judicial reform. In Croatia, inter-institutional disputes and overreaches by the prime minister have been problematic for years, but were once again thrust into the spotlight during this year’s elections.
One need not look far to see that these are shared problems across the region. Take Montenegro, where volatile party politics following the end of single-party rule in 2023 brought on a constitutional crisis and halted EU-oriented justice reforms until just recently. North Macedonia is another case in point: before returning to power this spring, the right-wing opposition boycotted parliamentary sessions throughout 2023 to stall reform until pre-election wheeling and dealing allowed them to change the criminal code and safeguard members from corruption investigations.
Whether fueled by instability, polarisation, or self-interested obstructionism, many EU candidate countries are struggling to upend the very logic of their hybrid political systems, in which legislatures serve officials rather than citizens. To that end, more attention should be paid not only to political parties’ transparency (codes of ethics for officials, party financing regulations, etc.) but also broader public administration reforms, technical assistance to parliamentary staff, and protections for civil society’s oversight roles like consultation and monitoring. These are some of the same factors that have made the difference in rebuilding damaged democratic institutions in more consolidated democracies like Slovenia and Czechia, suggesting they are indeed essential building blocks for democracy just as much as courts and prosecutors are.
A call to action for Brussels
As Croatia’s judicial independence wanes and HDZ edges closer to state capture, the EU has the prerogative and the tools to step in. More direct messaging against HDZ’s rule of law abuses is an obvious starting point. In addition, the new European Commission must be prepared to initiate infringement proceedings, freeze solidarity and cohesion funds, or trigger the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism, should the Croatian government continue to pass illiberal legislation that is not aligned with the bloc’s core values.
If Brussels does not address Croatia’s poor rule of law record, it risks sending the wrong signal to its aspirant members both in the Western Balkans and elsewhere: that in the Union democracy is negotiable. But to effectively push back against these abuses, it must also expand its understanding of the rule of law to meet the realities of poor governance in the broader region. The Croatian case underscores that without targeted rule of law reforms that go beyond cosmetic changes to the justice system, the transformative potential of the EU will continue to diminish.
