Croatian Party of Pensioners

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Croatian political party
Hrvatska stranka umirovljenika
Croatian Party of Pensioners
Leader	Silvano Hrelja
Preceded by: Vladimir Jordan
Founded	1991
Headquarters	Zagreb
Political Ideology	Single-issue politics
Website	Croatian Party of Pensioners
See also	Political parties Elections

The Croatian Party of Pensioners (Croatian: Hrvatska stranka umirovljenika) is a Croatian political party.

The Party was formed due to number of political, economic and demographic reasons. When the party was founded, few people took it seriously and many commentators speculated that the ultimate purpose of HSU was take away pensioners' votes from rejuvenated SDP and thus help ruling HDZ 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 refusing to honour a Constitutional Court verdict that ordered the government to pay back pensions that had been denied in early 1990s.

The party is led by Vladimir Jordan. At the last legislative elections, 23 November 2003, the party won 4.0% of the popular vote and 3 out of 151 seats entering parliament for the first time. This was the biggest surprise of the election because they used very little propaganda to promote the party. They got more than 5% of the votes in 3 electoral districts and in 4 of them between 4% and 5% of the votes.

After the elections HSU has agreed to support Ivo Sanader as the new prime minister and provided the necessary votes for HDZ and its allies to form a majority in the Croatian Parliament. This de facto coalition remains to this day, although the HSU supported Stipe Mesić against HDZ candidate Jadranka Kosor in the 2005 presidential election.

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.