The surprise announcement by Croatian prime minister Ivo Sanader on July 1 2009 that he was resigning and withdrawing from politics has sent shock waves through the country and drawn reaction from Slovenia, with which it is locked in a border dispute that is blocking Croatia’s European Union accession hopes.
 
At a special news conference, Sanader rejected speculation that he was resigning as prime minister for health reasons and denied that he intended standing for president in 2010, or that he would take up a European post.
 
Prime minister since 2003 and in his second term, Sanader has pushed forward deputy prime minister Jadranka Kosor to succeed him. However, president Stjepan Mesic – who publicly expressed surprise at Sanader’s decision – was noncommittal about who he would ask to form a government.
 
Sanader told journalists in Zagreb that the border dispute with Slovenia had been on his mind when he considered whether to resign.
 
Mesic, while saying that he had co-operated well with Sanader, said that it was surprising that the prime minister had chosen to step down while Croatia was facing a critical economic situation.
"The president cannot avoid expressing his bewilderment at the prime minister’s choice of a moment when he decided to leave, because there is no doubt that Croatia is in a very serious, maybe even critical economic situation, and that our association talks with the EU are at a standstill because of neighboring Slovenia’s blockade, which has worsened relations with that country," Mesic’s office said in a statement.
Slovenian prime minister Borut Pahor said that the Sanader resignation was domestic issue, but he hoped that it would not influence the outcome of the border dispute and that Croatia could continue its EU accession talks.
Croatia has been hoping to file an application before the end of this year to join the EU.
Sanader told the news conference that his country wanted to get on with EU accession talks and could not accept that six months had been lost because of the border dispute. In late June, in one of its last acts in the presidency of the EU, the Czech Republic called off a meeting on the dispute, a move interpreted in some quarters as an attempt by the EU to get Croatia and Slovenia to come up with a bilateral solution.
Within Croatia, opposition parties hit out at Sanader for attempting to continue to wield influence over the running of the country by using Kosor as a proxy, and there was at least one call for elections to be held.
Sanader’s decision to resign was reason enough for the Croatian opposition to demand new parliamentary elections, Social Democratic Party official Zoran Milanovic said, quoted by Serbian website B92.