The Croatian Party of Pensioners ( hr, Hrvatska stranka umirovljenika or HSU) is a Croatian centre-leftpolitical party that is currently led by
Veselko Gabričević
Rastislav Veselko (born 29 April 1988) is a Slovak professional ice hockey player who played with HC Slovan Bratislava in the Slovak Extraliga
The Tipos Extraliga (Slovak Extraliga) is the highest-level ice hockey league in Slovakia. From ...
.
When the party was founded, few people took it seriously and many commentators speculated that the ultimate purpose of HSU was to take away pensioners' votes from rejuvenated SDP and thus help ruling
HDZ
The Croatian Democratic Union ( hr, Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, lit=Croatian Democratic Community, HDZ) is the major conservative, centre-right political party in Croatia. It is one of the two major contemporary political parties in Cro ...
remain in power. However, the party gradually built its organisation throughout the country and slowly rose in popularity due to both HDZ and left-centre cabinets of
Ivica Račan
Ivica Račan (; 24 February 1944 – 29 April 2007) was a Croatian politician who served as Prime Minister of Croatia from 2000 to 2003, heading two centre-left coalition governments.
Račan became the first prime minister of Croatia not to be a ...
refusing to honour a Constitutional Court verdict that ordered the government to pay back pensions that had been denied in the early 1990s.
HSU gained much notoriety after local and regional elections in May 2005 when many of its members got elected on left-centre election tickets only to support HDZ and right-wing parties during the forming of coalition governments.
At the
2007 Croatian parliamentary election
Parliamentary elections were held in Croatia on 25 November 2007 and for overseas voters on 24 and 25 November.D'Hondt method) allowed them to receive only a single representative in the Parliament, Silvano Hrelja. They continued to support the government of Ivo Sanader, which in turn continued to pursue pensioner-related policies aligned with the opinion of the HSU.
In 2009, the economic crisis caused the government of Jadranka Kosor to start talks about extra crisis taxation and after a row with the finance minister Ivan Šuker, the HSU withdrew their support for the government.
The party participated in the Kukuriku coalition since 2011. It continued with the coalition Croatia is Growing at the
2015 Croatian parliamentary election
Parliamentary elections were held in Croatia on 8 November 2015. All 151 seats in the Parliament were up for election. This parliamentary election was the 8th since the first multi-party election in 1990 and the first since Croatia joined the Eu ...
. In that election, it became possible for the candidates of HSU to receive preferential votes, and they won a total of 11,026 (out of a coalition total of 744,507).