Stjepan Mesić

Stjepan "Stipe" Mesić (born 24 December 1934) is a Croatian lawyer and politician who served as President of Croatia from 2000 to 2010.

After his mother died in 1936, his older sister Marija was sent to their uncle Tomo Pernar in France, while Stjepan was put in the care of his grandmother Marija until his father was remarried in 1938 to Mileva Jović, an ethnic Serb who gave birth to Slavko and Jelica.

His father joined the Yugoslav Partisans in 1941.

The Mesić family spent most of the Second World War in refuges in Mount Papuk and Orahovica when it was occasionally liberated.

In 1945, the family took refuge from the final fighting of the war in Hungary, along with 10,000 other refugees, and subsequently settled in Našice, where Josip Mesić became the chairman of the District Council.

The family soon moved to Osijek, where Stipe graduated from 4-year elementary school and finished two years of 8-year gymnasium.

In 1949, his father was reassigned back to Orahovica, and Stipe continued his education at the gymnasium in Požega.

He graduated in 1955 and, as an exemplary student, was admitted to the League of Communists of Yugoslavia.

The same year on 17 March, his father died of cancer.

Mesić was a deputy in the Croatian Parliament in the 1960s, and was then absent from politics until 1990 when he joined the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), and was named President of the Executive Council (Prime Minister) of the Socialist Republic of Croatia (then still a constituent republic of the SFR Yugoslavia) after HDZ won the elections.

His cabinet is, despite holding office before Croatia's independence, considered by the Government of Croatia to have been the first government cabinet of the current Croatian republic.

Stjepan Mesić continued his studies at the Law Faculty at the University of Zagreb, where he graduated in 1961.

That same year, Mesić married Milka Dudunić, of Ukrainian and Serbian ethnic origin from Hrvatska Kostajnica, with whom he has two daughters.

After graduation, he worked as an intern at the municipal court in Orahovica and the public attorney's office at Našice.

He served his compulsory military service in Bileća and Niš, becoming a reserve officer.

After passing the judicial examination, Mesić was appointed a municipal judge, but soon became embroiled in a scandal when he publicly denounced local politicians for using official vehicles for private purposes.

He was nearly expelled from the party over the incident and in 1964 he moved to Zagreb to work as a manager for the company Univerzal.

In 1966, he ran as an independent candidate in the election for his municipal council, and defeated two other candidates, one from the Communist Party and the other from the Socialist Union of Working People.

In 1967, he became the mayor of Orahovica and a member of the Parliament of SR Croatia.

In 1967, as mayor, Mesić attempted the building of a private factory in the town, the first private factory in Yugoslavia.

However, this was personally denounced by Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito as an attempt to silently introduce capitalism, which was illegal under the then-existing constitution.

In 1967, when a group of Croatian nationalists published Declaration on the Status and Name of the Croatian Literary Language, Mesić publicly denounced it as a diversionary attack against the very foundations of Yugoslavia and called for its authors to be prosecuted by law.

However, in the 1970s Mesić supported the nationalist Croatian Spring movement which called for Croatian equality within the Yugoslav Federation on economic, political and cultural levels.

The government indicted him for "acts of enemy propaganda".

The initial trial lasted three days in which 55 witnesses testified, only five against him, but he was sentenced to 20 years in jail on charges that he was a member of a Croatian terrorist group.

He appealed and the trial was prolonged, but in 1975 he was incarcerated for one year and served his sentence at the Stara Gradiška prison.

Before serving two five-year terms as president, he was prime minister of SR Croatia (1990) after the first multi-party elections, the last president of the Presidency of Yugoslavia (1991) and consequently secretary general of the Non-Aligned Movement (1991), as well as speaker of the Croatian Parliament (1992–1994), a judge in Našice, and mayor of his hometown of Orahovica.

Mesić was elected again in 1990 as a candidate of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) in the first multi-party elections in Croatia after World War II.

He became the general secretary of HDZ and later the Prime Minister of Croatia.

He served in this post from May to August 1990, when he resigned to become the vice-president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY).

He later resigned from his post and was appointed to serve as the Socialist Republic of Croatia's membership of the Yugoslav federal presidency where he served first as vice president and then in 1991 as the last President of Yugoslavia before Yugoslavia dissolved.

Following the breakup of Yugoslavia and Croatia's independence, Mesić served as Speaker of the Croatian Parliament from 1992 to 1994, when he left HDZ.

With several other members of parliament, he formed a new party called Croatian Independent Democrats (HND).

In 1997 the majority of HND members, including Mesić, merged into the Croatian People's Party (HNS).

After Franjo Tuđman died in December 1999, Mesić won the elections to become the next president of Croatia in February 2000.

He was the last Croatian president to serve under a strong semi-presidential system, which foresaw the president as the most powerful official in the government structure and allowed him to appoint and dismiss the Prime Minister and his cabinet.

This system was abolished in favor of an incomplete parliamentary system, which retained the direct election of the president but greatly reduced his powers in favor of strengthening the office of Prime Minister.

He was reelected in January 2005 for a second five-year term.

Mesić always topped the polls for the most popular politician in Croatia during his two terms.

Stjepan Mesić, commonly called "Stipe", was born in Orahovica, Yugoslavia to Josip and Magdalena (née Pernar) Mesić.