Zagreb - The reign of Croatia's ailing president, Dr Franjo Tudjman, came to a halt yesterday when the constitutional court declared him temporarily incapacitated and handed powers to the parliamentary speaker, Chris Stephen writes.
The term "temporary incapacity" was dreamed up by members of Croatia's ruling party, the HDZ, because the prospect of losing their autocratic President, and the power struggle likely to follow, was too ghastly for them to contemplate.
Many in Croatia think Dr Tudjman, gravely ill with cancer, will never recover, and there are already signs that his power structure, compared by some to the court of a latter-day Sun King, was beginning to unravel. Nowhere in Europe outside Yugoslavia is so much power concentrated in the hands of one man. Dr Tudjman has sweeping powers over most aspects of Croatian life. Worse, there is no obvious successor.