Slaven Letica

Slaven Letica is a Croatian author, commentator and politician.

In the 1980s, Letica was a professor of the Sociology of Medicine at the Medical Faculty of the University of Zagreb.

In late 1980s, as the Communist grip on public discourse weakened, Letica began to use new freedoms to advocate various reforms. In doing so, he wrote many articles and columns and he began to appear in television talk shows and town hall meetings. There he began to show a great talent for self-promotion, quickly becoming one of the most popular and the most recognisable intellectuals in Yugoslavia. Often, the ideas he floated at that time were nothing more than publicity stunts, including campaigning for President of Yugoslavia and offering to serve as political advisor to Slobodan Milošević.

In 1990 it was Franjo Tuđman who took this offer seriously and made him his chief political advisor. As such, Letica never missed an opportunity for self-promotion. During negotiations which Tuđman pursued with the leader of the Serbs in Croatia, Jovan Rašković, Letica secretly recorded tapes of some of the conversations. Subsequently, he leaked these tapes to the Croatian media, hoping that some of Rašković's remarks would give offense to his fellow Croatian Serbs and turn them away from Rašković's secessionist policies. The effort spectacularly backfired and contributed to the escalation of conflict into war. That and other gaffes finally prompted Tuđman to sack Letica in early 1991.

In the next few years Letica continued to appear in the Croatian media as a commentator, finally becoming a columnist in the magazine "Globus". There he received some notoriety due to an unsigned article (which he eventually admitted to having written) directed against five Croatian feminists (Slavenka Drakulić, Vesna Kesić, Jelena Lovrić, Dubravka Ugrešić and Rada Iveković ), accusing them of betraying Croatia. [http://www.h-alter.org/tekst/vjestice,-inkvizitori-i-dobrotvori/7777]

In 2000 Letica ran for Croatian president as an independent candidate. Although he finished fourth, his relatively high percentage of votes won made him desirable to the Croatian Party of Rights (HSP), a right-wing party in desperate need to tone down its negative far-right image. Letica, with his reputation of refined urbanite and European intellectual, served this purpose very well and in 2003, as a candidate on HSP's list, won a seat in the Sabor (Parliament of Croatia).

Back in the public spotlight, Letica again couldn't resist the temptation for self-promotion. Using his striking resemblance to Josip Jelačić, a Croatian 19th century national icon, he began to dress up in historical costumes to stage highly publicised political demonstrations. Those efforts, however, backfired and the Croatian public gradually ceased to take Letica seriously.

The HSP nevertheless used Letica again as their candidate in the 2005 presidential elections. When Letica won less votes than in 2000, he accused the HSP of not supporting him enough. He quit the party midway through his term and remained in the Sabor until the end of 2007 as an independent.

In the 2007 parliamentary elections, his independent list for the Zagreb region failed to gain the five percent of the vote needed to enter the Parliament.