That bad, probably not. But there were many unscrupulous individuals. Our last president was a woman. And oh, boy was that a disaster. The word is she got boob job on taxpayers dime, and is best known for being a cheerleader to the Croatian Football team. A true embarrassment. Now I hear they are giving her a job at NATO , to be useless and get money off course. A classical revolving door scenario. She gets funded to become a politician, she is uterallly incompetent, but can use the connections and position of a president to do favors, for globalists in EU for example. And once she is no longer president, they give her a job in some private firm or NATO to sit on a board and be useless, but gets payed for services rendered, while in political position to pass the laws and do stuff it was required off her.

Basically what keeps Croatia together is ironically bad economy and civil solidarity based on long standing traditions. Mostly a localized version of Catholicism.

Bad economy meant that there was not a lot of immigration, so the population remained largely Croatian. Or similar enough. Some Serbs, many Bosnian etc. But still similar enough. Unlike Western Europe not great economy, meant that "refugees" could not get free stuff here. So they didn't stay.

This is I would think similar to most East European countries. Someone explained it well in this paragraph from a book, Liberalism A Very Short Introduction by Michael Freeden, 2015.

Basically distrust in goverment after fall of communism, meant that many adopted neolibearlism to improve economy, but did not embrace fully neither state control nor liberal religion as it is in western Europe, but relied on traditional conservative values and civil solidarity to get by.

For example, Croatia became independent country in 1991, but adopted constitution similar to that of United States. As we know from American experience, without the Judeo Christian values underneath, its just a paper, and soon turns to chaos. But with traditional values, its not the constitution that keeps people together, its the traditions. Close community gatherings, and above all family.

I think in 2003 there was a referendum to vote on what is marriage and it was voted to be between a man and a woman. So no gay marriage.

But than trough activism and Soros and EU pressure, lately under the disguise of Corona scamdamic, they pushed for gay adoption etc. You know where that is going. There was backlash, but politicians pushed it anyway, because our current administration is more than happy to take the money from EU and be their lackey. Unlike Hungary. However there is still very strong Catholic upbringing , not so much religion as cultural and there is reliance on traditions , less than goverment. So will see where it leads. But I know many do not welcome the whole rainbow communist movement.

Restrictions:Constitution bans same-sex marriage since the 2013 referendum.

Adoptioname-sex couples allowed to adopt since 2021, Same-sex couples allowed to foster care since 2020

The adoption was not something people voted on and many protested, even foster care social workers were against it, but under EU pressure on the goverment, the goverment pressured the social workers. Its the typical globalist push for new religion. I think many understand it better than in some Western Nations, but as you would expect we have corrupt goverment, like in most countries. Being a small country, politicians are happy to get money from EU and that does not come cheap. So in tradition of politics, they sell out the people. No surprise there. There are very few statesmen left.

"A politician thinks of the next election - a statesman of the next generation."
James Freeman Clarke, US minister, theologian, author (1810-1888)

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East European liberalism after 1989

One intriguing aspect of neoliberalism has been its attractiveness to a number of former communist countries following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. In the absence of a strong liberal tradition in those countries it was hardly surprising that garbled versions of liberalism took hold in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. What in fact went under the name of liberalism pulled in two very different directions. The already weak manifestations of liberalism in Eastern Europe suffered an identity crisis in the post-communist search for new identities: its emblematic defence of individual liberty and social solidarity were consigned to civil society, while its equally characteristic championing of competition and private property were the province of a market society. The two parts shared little and were made to lead separate institutional and ideological lives.

The appeal of neoliberalism was understandable in countries whose economies had suffered under communism. The personal circumstances of most citizens made a consumer society on imagined ‘Western’ models of opulence particularly alluring. Citizens were prompted to search for a more efficient economic system whose fruits were tangible and immediate, and neoliberalism seemed to hold out the prospect of a fast fix. But the other direction some East European countries took was a flight from the oppressive and dictatorial states under which people had lived. Here liberals genuinely had to make up lost ground for the many decades endured under totalitarian systems, in particular the absence of robust, basic first layer constraints and procedures. The liberal language of human rights and of bringing back the rule of law and democratic constitutional arrangements was in the mouths of many. As against the powerful state under communism, many liberals pinned their hopes on the strengthening of civil society as a refuge from the state. ‘Civil society’ was the prevalent term for the network of voluntary and private associations that made up society, in the civic and cultural as well as the economic spheres.

In that soil, fourth layer welfare liberalism, relying as it did on the benevolence of an active and democratic state, but a state nonetheless, could hardly flourish. Both civil society and market society tendencies shared the quest to diminish the centrality of the state as far as possible, whether it acted for good or for evil. The state, in the words of the Polish academic Jerzy Szacki, was seen ‘as the agent of all social injustice’, a position quite out of step with left-liberal ideological and philosophical theories. Collective action was mistakenly identified with the socialist collectivism of the old regimes. Anything even remotely associated with collectivism was thus to be avoided.

The belief in the harmonious functioning of civil society without some state regulation amidst the complexities of the modern world was naive and illusory, as it previously had been in liberalism’s past history, when private and charitable institutions proved unable to provide solutions to the social problems of the 19th century. Indeed, neoliberalism now illustrated once again how dominant private interests merely moved in to fill the power vacuum caused by bypassing the state. At the same time, visions of civil society in Eastern Europe demanded levels of social homogeneity that fifth layer multicultural liberals would consider utopian and regard with suspicion. And the misleading idea that civil society was a parallel society, happily separate from the distasteful world of politics, implied that political issues did not permeate the whole of society. The discrete notions of the state, the government, and politics were frequently and carelessly equated. Liberalism failed to take deeper roots in Eastern Europe, while its ideas of liberty were pressed into personalized and idealized intellectual and artistic spheres.

• Liberalism A Very Short Introduction by Michael Freeden, 2015.

The cheerleader president.