Keeping a roof over your head: housing and anti-debt movements in Croatia and Serbia during the Great Recession

Abstract

We establish features of political opportunity structures of Croatia and Serbia as parameters that help explain the strategies pursued by housing and anti-debt social movements in the two countries. Relying on the protest event analysis data for 2007-2017, we identify peaks in protest mobilisations and levels of disruptiveness. Furthermore, we analyse the actors' strategy of electoral contestation and compare it across cases. In Croatia, movement actors organised into political parties, while in Serbia, the electoral turn has remained fringe. We argue that this divergence can be explained by different levels of institutional openness to new challengers.

‘New’ but ‘Squeezed’: Middle Class and Mortgaged Homeownership in Croatia

“…However, mediating this access by mortgage finance turned out to be a mixed blessing for the middle class due to the resulting high levels of debt, the effects of extensive predatory practices, and volatile housing prices, giving rise to a public recognition of mortgage debt as a middle-class experience and to a formation of middle-class politics that have more in common with the disappointed and defensive middle classes in the West than the ascending and economically liberal new middle classes in the global South. While mainstream mortgage debtors in Croatia as well as Serbia gravitated to institutional and consumer rights-based politics (Dolenec et al, 2021; Mikuš, 2019a), their Hungarian counterparts exposed to the same predatory lending practices did not shy away from far-right registers and alliances as part of their more eclectic and insurgent politics (Molnár, 2016; Szabó, 2018). The Croatian case is thus likely relevant for other Eastern European countries with comparable material conditions shaped by similar transformations of housing systems and mortgage finance and ownership-oriented housing policies skewed in favour of the middle class (Florea et al, 2022; Makszin and Bohle, 2020; Stephens et al, 2015).…”

Urban Housing Inequity: Housing Deprivation and Social Response in the City of Naples

“…A direct effect of the emergence of movements is to generate awareness and create a community with a strong identity at a political level [61][62][63][64]. In Croatia, the Human Shield movement was structured in a real party that expressed a candidate in the presidential elections collecting in 2014 (16.42%) who managed, in 2015, to express an MP [65]. The struggle for housing thus became a component of a series of broader social demands [66], always in a sense of opposition to the neoliberal system [43].…”

From the streets to the town halls: Municipalist platforms in the post-Yugoslav space

“…Urban changes and urban activism in the post-Yugoslav space have sparked a proliferation of studies dealing with the opposition to the Belgrade Waterfront Project (Draško et al, 2020; Fagan and Ejdus, 2020; Grubbauer and Čamprag, 2019; Lalović et al, 2015; Matković and Ivković, 2018; Perić, 2020; Petrović, 2019) and RtC movements in Zagreb (Bilić and Stubbs, 2015; Dolenec et al, 2017; Razsa, 2015), as well as housing and anti-debt movements in both countries (Dolenec et al, 2021; Mikuš and Rodik, 2021; Rodik, 2015; Rodik et al, 2019; Vilenica, 2017). Nevertheless, so far scholarship has devoted little attention to the shift from urban social movements to engagement in institutional politics in the post-Yugoslav space, with some notable exceptions (Milan and Dolenec, forthcoming; Tiedemann, 2019).…”

“…In both cases these movements attempted to enter the electoral arena at the local level. Notwithstanding different electoral outcomes, and a divergent openness of the political system to new challengers (Dolenec et al, 2021), urban social movements in both countries followed similar strategies and adopted the same action repertoires. The comparison of the two cases helps to illuminate the pathways these movements followed, shedding light in particular on the influence of European and regional networks in which they were embedded and on the historical socialist legacy on which they drew.…”

“… 10. Anti-eviction mobilisations and anti-debt activism formed an important part of recent mobilisations which appeared and developed mostly in the main urban centres of Croatia and Serbia. Since the 1990s, both countries have experienced rapid privatisation of previously socially owned housing (Dolenec et al, 2021). I deem it necessary to include them in the broader RtC movement as they emerged as a consequence of the privatisation of urban space, which also involved the housing sector (and social housing in particular). …”