The north answers back: Iric takes both mountain seats

Northern Power has taken both Viskogorje seats for the first time and held its northern heartland, turning the 2022 Assembly election into the party’s best result yet.

Sifet Izbe, the former Republic footballer recruited to head the party’s mountain list, unseated Stoyan Vasilis with 28.9 per cent of the vote. Chwa Spas topped the district on 43.5 per cent. Vasilis, who has represented the district since 1992, announced his retirement within hours of the count.

“We did not campaign against a district, we campaigned against a drainage pipe,” Izbe said at a count in the Viskogorje assembly hall, referring to the tailings discharge that has discoloured the upper Kambel for a decade. The line reprised a theme that dominated the campaign in the north: the cost borne by mountain and forest communities for the resource economy controlled from Sinj.

In Severnivaraje, Iric and Branimir Hup held both seats with 41.7 and 34.2 per cent respectively. In Zahodecelska, Nils Billing pushed the incumbents close on 23.9 per cent — the party’s strongest result in a district it has never won.

The national picture remains one the capital’s press is determined to describe as stability. The Herald, which on Monday called the result a “return to normal,” reported the governing party’s six seats as a mandate. It did not lead on the north. It seldom does. The court circular of Zvonomir Avenue has never found much news value in a river that runs orange.

Blue Dawn did lose two seats, and the Civic Renewal Front doubled its caucus on a platform of civil liberties and competitive digital policy. Vesna Horvatin’s sweep of Kakerovecska completed the CRF’s capture of a district Blue Dawn had held since 1979, and Viktor Durak’s vote collapsed to 16.2 per cent. That is a rejection of the old corporate politics that Maj Holdings and its allies have long bankrolled.

It is not yet a rejection of SeverMin. The mining combine spent more on this election than the last, and its allies in the Assembly retain enough seats to block any serious review of the Cetingrad leases. But for the first time in two decades, the periphery has sent a delegation to Sinj that does not need to apologise for it.

Iric, for his part, was blunt. “Four seats is not the summit,” he told Northfocus. “It is the first step out of the valley.”