In Croatia, almost five thousand polling stations will open at 7 a.m. on Sunday, June 1st, where voters will elect 12 county prefects, mayors of Zagreb and 46 other cities, and mayors of 62 municipalities in the second round of local elections. The remaining heads of the executive branch were elected two weeks ago.
Polling stations are open until 19 p.m., until which time a two-day election silence is in effect, which began in the early hours of Saturday.
In addition to part of the executive branch, the municipal council of the Municipality of Lećevica, in the Split-Dalmatia County, is also being re-elected on Sunday.
This was the decision of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Croatia, accepting the appeal of Renate Kelam, the leader of the independent list, who won two out of seven councilors in the elections on May 18th, while the remaining five were won by the HDZ, whose mayor Ante Baran won his eighth term as head of the municipality.
Kelam complained about irregularities observed during the visits to voters who voted in their homes, and the Constitutional Court accepted her appeal and ordered a repeat election.
Among the cities that will elect their mayors in the second round are the three largest: Zagreb, Split and Rijeka, but also some smaller ones: Pula, Zadar, Dubrovnik, Šibenik, Karlovac, Sinj and Vukovar.
12 out of 20 counties await names of county prefects
The names of county prefects are awaiting 12 out of 20 counties: Varaždin, Zagreb, Koprivnica-Križevci, Brod-Posavina, Vukovar-Srijem, Istria, Primorje-Gorski Kotar, Lika-Senj, Zadar, Šibenik-Knin, Split-Dalmatia and Dubrovnik-Neretva.
Voters who come to the polling station on Sunday will be greeted with fewer ballots than two weeks ago, when both executive and representative local governments were elected at the same time.
The ballot they will receive will contain the names of only two candidates, and they will be ordered according to the number of votes they received in the first round; in the second round, the alphabetical order rule no longer applies.
As in the first round, the ballots for county prefects and the mayor of Zagreb are blue, and those for mayors and municipal heads are white.
The candidate who receives the most votes will win, and if both candidates receive the same number of votes, as there are examples of, a third round of elections will be held.
As in the first round, the right to vote is reserved for adult Croatian citizens residing in the municipality, city or county whose mayor, or county prefect, is being elected.
You can only vote in your place of residence, not in any other place.
How many voters responded to the calls to vote will be known at noon and 17 p.m., when the State Election Commission (SEC) will publish turnout data by 11:30 a.m. and 16:30 p.m., respectively.
The first election results will be known an hour after the polls close, at 20 p.m., and the winners and losers before 22 p.m.
The second round of elections is being held in 405 cities and municipalities, at 4,980 polling stations, and the elections will be monitored by around 5,500 observers. Three million 291 thousand ballots were printed for the second round, which is almost four times less than in the first round.
When the doors of the polling stations close on Sunday, Croatia will conclude its fourth election in just over a year, and its voters will be idle for the next three years.
Photo: PGK archive
