BELGRADE (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 06th July, 2020) The ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party of Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic is leading the parliamentary elections with an outlook of securing 61 seats in the legislature, according to an exit poll by the Ipsos research lab.
The right-centrist HDZ is followed by the center-left Restart coalition led by the Social-Democratic Party with projected 44 mandates and the rightist Homeland Movement of businessman Miroslav Skoro with 16 mandates.
As of 4.30 p.m. (14:30 GMT), the voter turnout was just above 34 percent.
Meanwhile, the political party close to Croatian President Zoran Milanovic has expressed discontent over the election results.
The election committee registered 3.85 million voters who cast their ballots at nearly 7,000 polling stations across the country and abroad.
Milanovic headed the largest opposition Social Democratic Party of Croatia until November 2016 and was eventually nominated as a presidential candidate in December 2019 by its supporters.
"I sincerely hope that the official results will be closer to the data of the [pre-election] opinion polls because this is a diametrically opposite result ... It seems that those people who stayed at home are our voters," Zlatko Komadina, the party's deputy chairman, told reporters.
The winning HDZ party, in turn, has expressed satisfaction with the exit poll results but noted that it was necessary to wait for the official announcement.
