Zagreb crisis
During the crisis the winning parties were unable to appoint their candidate for the Mayor of Zagreb because President of Croatia Franjo Tuđman refused to provide the formal confirmation of their decision.
The situation led to several huge protests and was not resolved until the next local elections in April 1997 after which two opposition members of the assembly switched to Tuđman's Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party.
It was believed that the widespread euphoria following the August 1995 Operation Storm and Croatian military success in the last stages of the still ongoing Bosnian War, together with a massive propaganda drive supported by the state-controlled media, would lead to Tuđman's party comfortably winning majority in the new municipal assembly.
Croatian legislation at the time stipulated that the mayor of Zagreb had the status equal to a county prefect (župan), and as such his appointment had to be confirmed by the President of Croatia.
This was seen as a mere formality, because Tuđman had already made a precedent by confirming opposition prefects following the disastrous defeat of his party in the February 1993 local elections in the Istria County.
Throughout the following 18 months, three other opposition candidates from HSLS ranks (Jozo Radoš, Ivo Škrabalo and Dražen Budiša) had been proposed by the municipal assembly, only to be denied the required presidential confirmation every time.
The spectacle of the nation's capital having two administrations not recognizing each other and the country's leader refusing to acknowledge the will of the voters led many to believe that Croatia had experienced a dramatic drop in democratic standards during the war, and that this state of affairs would not be resolved as long as Tuđman remained in power.
Increasingly paranoid remarks made by Tuđman in public, who began to describing his political opponents and their supporters as "foreign agents" and "enemies of the state" also contributed to that assessment.
The announcement of the decision sparked a mass protest which saw about 120,000 people gathered at the Ban Jelačić Square on 21 November 1996 in the biggest demonstrations in Croatia's modern history.
Upon returning to Croatia, Tuđman made statements attacking the protests, calling his opponents "green and yellow devils" and accusing them of being foreign mercenaries and traitors who sold out.
