Do we like them?Do we like Andrej Plenković?
Our score: 6 out of 10. A decent public stand against anti-LGBTQ+ attacks, balanced by contested border policing and a string of ministers accused of wrongdoing.
Plenković is the face of Croatia's conservative HDZ and has led a government that has run in coalition with partners of different stripes. He is a career politician rather than a celebrity, so the colourful backstory is thin in the pages we could open. What the record does show is a long-running, hard-nosed political operator who keeps the coalition together and keeps picking fights with the president.
The best moment for this page's question came in July 2021, after violence broke out around the Zagreb Pride parade. Plenković called it unacceptable and said “Croatia is big enough for everyone to be free.” He also backed his deputy's condemnation of the attacks on LGBTIQ people and said he wanted an inclusive society. That is a clear, on-the-record stand, and it counts.
The harder side is the border. In October 2021, amid allegations of violent pushbacks of migrants at the Croatia-Bosnia border, Plenković asked the relevant services to report on what happened. He also stressed that Croatia has a duty to protect its border and prevent illegal migration. Rights groups and the Council of Europe have criticised Croatian border policing, and the authorities have denied the allegations, so where you land depends on whether you read his response as due process or deflection.
Then there's the company he has kept in cabinet. In October 2022, Croatian anti-corruption investigators indicted eight people, including four former ministers from his HDZ-led government. They were alleged to have misused grants and to have rigged recruitment, and the accused deny nothing we could see on the page. The article did not carry any comment from Plenković, and we couldn't find the final court outcomes, so treat them as allegations.
The latest news is more feud than scandal. In July 2026 Plenković accused the president of pressuring the army chief to act unlawfully over the Paris parade, and said the army is not Milanović's puppet. Earlier, in January, he said Croatia would not join Donald Trump's Board of Peace for now, citing a review and legal questions. Neither episode is about harm to people; they show a PM who is blunt with rivals and cautious with Washington.
On the planet and on women, we found nothing in pages we could open that points to a campaign against either. That is not the same as a clean bill of health: we couldn't read full reports on the contested Thompson concert row or his climate record, so don't treat the silence as a pass. The honest summary is a decent-but-incomplete picture.