One of the most charismatic Croatian politicians, the first president SDP and former prime minister Ivica Račan he died on this day in 2007. At 3:05 a.m. on April 29, he lost his fight for life in the hospital bed of the Zagreb Clinical Hospital Center where he was staying after doctors discovered a malignant tumor.
At the end of November 2006, he suffered from severe pain in his shoulder. At first, it was suspected that it was a “frozen shoulder” syndrome because he loved to play tennis, but at the end of January, the doctor Josip Paladino discovered a tumor on his shoulder. A short time later it was announced that it was already a metastasis and that the primary tumor was probably in the kidney. Sensing his end, Račan resigned from the post of SDP president on April 11.
Photo: Zeljko Lukunic/PIXSELL
Photo: Zeljko Lukunic/PIXSELL
Ivica Račan in the entrance of his building the day after he announced to the public that he was diagnosed with an atypical tumor on his right shoulder
Ivica Račan was born on February 24, 1944 in the German town of Ebersbach. His father Ivan was a court interpreter in the prison camp there. Račan’s mother, Marija Draženović, the Nazis arrested her in the Lika village of Križpolje and transferred her to Ebersbach, where she met her future husband and Račan’s father. Due to her heavy pregnancy, she was pulled out of the camp by a German woman, with whom she later did household and agricultural work.
Survived the bombing as a child
After Ivica was born, the German sent him and his mother to her sister in Dresden, where they survived the Allied bombing of the city. They spent four days in the basement before they were found. Ivan’s father was released from the camp by the Americans.
After the end of the war, Marija and Ivan met again. They lived in Bratislava for a while, and then returned to Croatia. Little Ivica spent his childhood on a farm in Slavonski Brod.
After high school, he dreamed of an acting career and tried to enroll in the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb. When he didn’t pass the entrance exam, he still decided to go to the Faculty of Law.
He joined the Union of Communists in 1959, and in 1967 he was employed as a research associate at the Institute for Social Research. He graduated in 1970, and at that time he was in charge of ideological work at the Union of Communists in the Zagreb municipality of Centar. After the collapse of the Croatian Spring, he was co-opted into the City Committee of Zagreb and then into the Executive Committee of the SK Croatia.
In 1978, he had a car accident in which he almost died. In an accident on the Zagreb-Belgrade highway, more than ten people died after the driver of a German-registered car fell asleep at the wheel and collided with a truck.
Almost died in a car accident
A car with Račan was driving behind the truck. He hit the trailer of the truck, killing two of his companions – the federal minister of the interior Milan Miskovic and the lieutenant general of the JNA and the head of KOSA Franjo Sertić. After the accident, Račan had complete amnesia and had to learn to speak and walk again. His life was then saved by a stranger who did not want to wait for the emergency room, but transported him to the health center in Ivanić town.
He moved to the presidency of CKSKH in 1978. From 1982 he was the director of the political school in Kumrovac, and from 1986 to 1989 a member of the presidency of CKSKJ. In mid-December 1989, he was elected president of CKSKH.
Not long after, it was announced that the first multi-party elections would be held in Croatia. He was the head of the Croatian delegation at the 14th SKJ congress, where he openly clashed with Slobodan Milosevic and, after the Slovenes left the congress, said that “we (SKH) cannot accept the Yugoslav Party without the Slovenes”. Then he and the Croatian delegation left the congress.
In the campaign for the first multi-party elections in the Republic of Croatia, HDZ called “a party with dangerous intentions”.
Photo: Boris Scitar/Vecernji list/PIXSELL
Photo: Boris Scitar/Vecernji list/PIXSELL
After the second round of elections, SKH received 35 percent of the vote, or about 75 parliamentary mandates. After the election, he renamed the party to the Party of Democratic Changes, and in 1991 to the Social Democratic Party of Croatia. When the Declaration on Independence and Sovereignty of Croatia was voted on, June 25, 1991, all SDP members left the Parliament. This almost cost them an electoral debacle, because in 1992 they received barely five percent of the vote. With blessing Franje Tuđman, they had to leave the building of the until recently CKSKH, a popular “cube” to the state, and were moved to Iblerov square. Due to the disastrous result in the elections, he almost retired from politics, but he decided to stay, which paid off in 2000, when he won the first elections after Tuđmana’s death and became prime minister in 2000.
Liked tennis, painting, admitted to consuming marijuana
The reign of the SDP at the time was marked by the beginning of cooperation with the Hague Court and the extradition of the first generals, as well as the construction of a large part of the Zagreb-Split highway. After the defeat in the 2003 elections, he remained a member of parliament, and later became the president of the National Committee for monitoring negotiations with the European Union. At the end of January 2007, he announced that he was leaving politics due to illness.
He hid his private life like a snake’s legs, claiming that he “doesn’t like to make himself showman“. However, in 1998, he admitted that he had consumed marijuana in Amsterdam, which is why some HDZ representatives called him the main dealer in the country. Besides tennis, he also liked painting, which is why his friends nicknamed him Jean, in the style of French artists.
He married three times. With his first wife Agatha, he had sons Ivan and Zoran. The second time he married Jelena Nenadić, a librarian at the political school, with whom he divorced after four years. The third happiness was brought to him by a professor of sociology at the University of Ohio, Dijana Pleština, with whom he was married from 1993 until his death.
“Power can be lost, but face not”, is one of Račan’s most quoted statements, which was also remembered by President Zoran Milanović in the premises on Iblerov Square the day after he shocked the Croatian political scene by announcing that he was entering the political game and planned to be the SDP candidate. in the parliamentary elections this April.
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