The Croatian portal H-Alter spoke with Katarina Peović of the Workers Front, Tomislav Kiš, General Secretary of the New Trade Union, and Gau Tam, a temporary worker in Croatia.

What is the common denominator for Black shirts, songs of the [popular far right] singer Marko Perković Thompson [1] and calls for the WWII fascist slogan “Za dom spremni” (For the Homeland - ready!) [2] to become the official greeting of Croatia’s armed forces – what is the common denominator? All of them seem associated with the entirely apolitical, non-discriminatory and we-have-nothing-to-do-with-fascism-we-promise Initiative for a Better Croatia (ZBH), a civic association registered in Knin on 9 September this year.

Their posters of black-clad men with open mouths and Croatian flags (whose coat of arms their chosen artificial intelligence somehow cannot get right) have been visible everywhere since mid-August, online and offline. On the banners of these soulless computer-generated beings reads the message “Against population replacement”, whilst the viral campaign invites us to a demonstration entitled “Protest to save Croatian culture – NO to the import of foreign workers!”.

Despite the so-called “population replacement theory” being demonstrably unfounded and used as a populist tool for spreading hatred, despite ZBH’s social media posts showing clear sympathy for far-right ideologies and despite their comments sections being unmoderated repositories for even more explicit Ustaše sympathisers [3]; despite all this, ZBH has, by the mere fact that the protest will legally take place in Zagreb, successfully convinced the public that it has only the welfare of the people at heart. This is largely thanks to the protest’s demands which appear well-intentioned to the untrained eye, even mostly sensible. The other part is due to skilled rhetoric that does not align with any political party, whilst openly attacking the centre- right Hrvatska demokratska zajednica (HZD - Croatian Democratic Union) [the dominant political party in Croatia since independence].

At a press conference held on 16 September at Zagreb’s Ban Jelačić Square, ZBH president Ronaldo Barišić even stated that this protest “is not an attack on foreign workers or a call to hatred. This is exclusively a call to people who lead this country to start working in the interests of the Croatian people”.

This makes the forthcoming protest all the more dangerous. It does not wear its hatred and anti-worker sentiment on its sleeve, but hides behind discourse manipulation, redirecting dissatisfaction with a real problem towards a fictitious target. Therefore, in the first half of this text we will show that ZBH is the voice of deceivers feigning to be the voice of the people, whilst in the second we will provide a more sensible and proactive analysis of the problem.

Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

At the aforementioned press conference, Barišić stated two things. First, that the ZBH association is not politically defined, but that the initiative began with a few young people active on social media. Barišić himself is not one of these apolitical influencers, but, he says, they “launched with the support of influential people, citizen journalists”. Second, Barišić claims the ZBH has had no party support, but rather self-initiated what became an extremely visible campaign in two months, investing their own money in paid advertisements. This story of their political neutrality is a blatant lie, and there are well-founded reasons to suspect the second point doesn’t hold water either.

Although Barišić did not say which portals launched the initiative, fortunately ZBH shared the press conference footage on Instagram jointly with several other profiles. In almost all of them, a certain Dominik Alpeza, a self-proclaimed citizen journalist, is listed as a collaborator. In practice, his citizen journalism for 44,000 social media followers consists of random, decontextualised footage of underprivileged groups, “caught” in aggressive behaviour or unhygienic conditions. There are also a few uninspired memes, obituaries for right-wing propagandist Charlie Kirk, and the occasional footage of anti-migrant protests from London.

The bulk of Alpeza’s content crafts a clear narrative – people of different skin colours and cultures are inherently unadaptable, sexually aggressive, dirty beasts. Indeed, Alpeza admits this himself over footage of one woman beating another: “And then they say it has nothing to do with race.” If his face seems familiar, it’s because GONG [a Croatian non-governmental organisation focused on election monitoring and civic education] connected him to the TikTok account “Ne možemo” in December last year. Alpeza denied this claim, but his intimate photographs with Prime Minister Andrej Plenković and HDZ membership card remain in the media.

Katarina Peović (Workers Front): “Attacking foreign workers is not only inhumane, because they are the most unprotected, but it is also strategically misguided, because they are not the source of the problem, but rather the Government of the Republic of Croatia and employers who work together on the legislative framework”

Even if the worthy citizen journalist, a member of the HZD party that ZBH formally denounces, was not involved in the organisation from the very beginning, ZBH’s wholehearted internet connection with him clearly indicates the kind of company they feel comfortable moving in, and around which ideological lines they dance. The same applies to other listed collaborators like crotradwave and ivososic, profiles for which it should be clear to everyone at first glance that these are systematic hate spreaders.

Regarding party independence, it’s hard to believe that several people born after 2000 without any experience in organising political gatherings suddenly managed to build such a campaign. It’s not impossible, but it’s potentially indicative that Barišić mentioned at the press conference that they support several petitions of Most [Most nezavisnih lista (Bridge of Independent Lists), a centrist political party in Croatia], a party whose electoral image he himself posted on his Facebook profile less than a month before establishing the ZBH page. It was mentioned that several politicians are being invited as speakers to the protest, so it wouldn’t be surprising if ZBH is a cheap guerrilla campaign by Most members who package anti-migrant sentiment as young people’s concern for the Croatian people.

Whether Barišić and ZBH are instruments of evil for collecting political points or ’just’ instrumentalise evil to sell T-shirts with the Croatian coat of arms for twenty euros (€20) in their web shop or to pocket citizens’ donations is of lesser importance. It’s only important to notice that they are the most transparent and opportunistic of blackshirts: in their very demands we can see the darkness and bias towards the rulers they supposedly fight against.

Let’s take the demands for strict law enforcement and security and health checks. These seem quite acceptable until we remember that such law is already strictly applied to foreign [non EU] workers who must undergo checks before employment. Together, these demands, like Alpeza’s posts, perfidiously push a vision of foreign workers as dangerous and dirty.

“They spread a statistically and scientifically false picture. Research has shown that increased migrant arrivals do not contribute to increased crime or violence at all, at least regarding first-generation migrants. Regarding later generations – the higher rate of minority group participation in crime is a consequence of their social deprivation and, paradoxically, precisely their integration into society – so-called ’downward assimilation’ because they form a growing share of the deprived segment of the working class in Western countries. So right-wing policies cannot contribute to reducing crime rates, because they attack the wrong issues,” explains labour leader Katarina Peović.

Peović advocates for reintroducing quotas for non EU foreign workers, because this would make clear whether there is a real deficit of workers in particular segments or whether it’s about employers who want to bring in migrants to pay their workers less. She also emphasises that the inspectorate is undercapacitated, which speaks to how employers and the Government of the Republic of Croatia itself are accomplices in criminal treatment of foreign and domestic workers: “Attacking foreign workers is not only inhumane, because they are the most unprotected, but it is also strategically misguided, because they are not the source of the problem, but rather the Government of the Republic of Croatia and employers who work together on the legislative framework and creating conditions for maximum exploitation of labour. Both domestic and foreign.”

Peović says about most of ZBH’s demands that they are “imprecise, or it’s classic right-wing rhetoric that directs dissatisfaction towards foreign workers, not towards capitalists and the state that protects capitalists. The right doesn’t hit the real target – capitalists for whom foreign workers are a means. Advocating for all workers, including foreign ones, means fighting against liberalisation of foreign labour imports, because employers don’t import them for multiculturalism, but exclusively to drive down labour prices in lower-paid jobs.”

Viewed from a perspective that sees the root of the problem, namely entrepreneurs’ need for higher profit rates which inevitably leads to lower worker wages and imports of cheaper labour, most of the ZBH demands sound empty. The second demand has nothing to do with labour imports, the third proposes nothing. The demand requiring exclusively Croatian language in public space, prompted by a Kaufland advertisement in Tagalog [4], sounds hypocritical when we remember that no one has complained about advertisements using English and German for decades [Croatia recieved more than 20m tourists in 2024]. The ninth demand is already legally in force, so without addressing employers who manipulate this law it’s meaningless, and the tenth is openly discriminatory and plays into the hands of capitalists who caused the problem of labour price destruction. Of ten demands, three remain that are somewhat productive, but woven into a tangle of problematic ideas can only spread general xenophobia and worsen conditions for domestic workers. This conclusion, however, does not answer the question of what to do about the destruction of labour prices and working conditions due to excessive imports of foreign workers.

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Solidarity

“To employ a foreign worker you must do a labour market test, but this gets abused. You as an employer need to place an advertisement, wait for someone domestic to respond, and only if no one responds can you employ a foreign worker. So the enployer places a bad advertisement, our own boys and girls run away from it and then he says he must import a foreign worker,” explains Tomislav Kiš, General Secretary of the New Trade Union, who organised a protest in July that included foreign workers. As a trade unionist he’s well acquainted with this tactic: “At meetings they say: ’If your union workers won’t work for this much, there are 300-400 thousand on the employment exchange who will.’ There aren’t that many Croatian workers on the exchange right now, so they thought of bringing in foreign ones.”

We’re conducting the conversation in the conference hall of the Trešnjevka district office, waiting for a delegation of foreign workers coming for a serious discussion about beginning trade union organisation. After their company went bankrupt, this delegation hasn’t been paid wages, and since foreign workers in Croatia have no legal protection, Kiš believes the trade union can provide support. Although there are several secret trade union members, foreign workers haven’t dared organise so far because employers often tell them they’re not allowed to. He mentions an example of an entrepreneur who convinced workers that trade unions in Croatia are considered terrorist groups.

“There are many difficulties due to legal regulations that exist in Croatia and fear that’s been drilled into their bones. Their work permit is tied to the employer. If he fires you, he cancels your work permit and you find yourself like a fish out of water. People don’t know how to manage, all offices are in Croatian,” explains Kiš. Still, he hopes to have more success with this group because only through everyone’s participation is it possible to fight for better rights.

If history teaches us anything, from the industrial revolution to today, it’s that better wages and working conditions are obtained through worker organisation that threatens entrepreneurs, not through self-sufficient protests. In the eyes of employers, who exploit foreign workers as much as domestic ones, there is no skin colour, only naked interest. Why should it be different for the working class?

“Foreign and domestic workers don’t have to be in mutual opposition. We want them to be equally paid. Even if young Croatian workers return, who will do that job until they return? Therefore there mustn’t be labour inflation because companies bring too many and see who will work cheapest. The struggle must be joint, because if we start dividing into ours and theirs, we won’t get anything. Classic divide et impera [5],” emphasises Kiš.

According to this, the tenth demand, for better wages for Croatians through subsidising and tax relief for entrepreneurs, would not only redirect already thinly distributed public spending to the wealthiest layer of people in the state, but through further manipulations could create an incentive for those same entrepreneurs not to employ domestic workers at all. Those same entrepreneurs already enjoy double privilege: reduced labour prices for everyone and an endless source of workers who can be cheated, oppressed and exploited without repercussions.

“There must be institutions that legally support foreign workers, because none of us can afford a lawyer. We plan to unionise, but we must discuss this. Most of us are traumatised, we haven’t had work for two to three months. We have no patience or financial support, we can’t pay rent,” representative worker Gau Tam describes the difficulties of unionising in their situation in conversation with H-Alter.

Tomislav Kiš: “Foreign and domestic workers don’t have to be in mutual opposition. We want them to be equally paid. The struggle must be joint, because if we start dividing into ours and theirs, we won’t get anything”

When asked how he comments on the protest, he answers that they see it as part of a global trend. He says they don’t take anyone’s jobs: “We pay taxes, work legally, have regular police checks. There are segments where the state should work so that we can all feel at home, safe, and not be terrorised by an employer or anyone else.”

If anyone from ZBH had ever spoken with a foreign worker, perhaps they wouldn’t see contempt in their eyes, as Barišić enigmatically noted at the press conference... perhaps they would discover that their demands haven’t even scratched the surface layer of problems foreign workers face. Barišić and his party are still young, perhaps they genuinely haven’t encountered worker history or critiques of political economy, perhaps there’s still time for them to understand that the national and worker questions are one and the same.

“If we’re already talking about a better Croatia, for me a better Croatia is one where everyone has equal rights. Same pay for the same job, regardless of where you were born. Which Croatia is better, with or without discrimination?” concludes Kiš.

Without an effectively organised, real left that addresses the problem of the dramatic fall in living standards, a vacuum is created that fascists will gladly exploit. From Jelena Miloš, parliamentary representative of the Možemo! party [6], we haven’t received a response by the conclusion of this text about how to approach the topic of employing foreign workers.

“The problem is that the nominal left doesn’t deal with worker issues, that it’s reduced to identity politics, and that the right ’grabs’ that space, and workers not only don’t see the left as their choice, but consider that leftists, because we indeed often come from the ranks of the so-called professional-managerial class, are (class) enemies. In such conditions the right intensifies the problem of migration – which has always been a matter of unequal development in capitalism, not an identity problem. The poor global South will continue migrating north due to economic, but increasingly also ecological conditions,” concludes Peović.

Jan Vržina