Croatia´s soft-spoken Mister Clean to take office

Social Democrat Ivo Josipovic, is to be sworn in as Croatia´s third president on Thursday.

ZAGREB, February 17, 2010 (AFP) - Social Democrat Ivo Josipovic, who is to be sworn in as Croatia's third president on Thursday, has capitalised on his image as a soft-spoken intellectual and a squeaky-clean politician.

In January's elections voters, seemingly fed up with the graft scandals that had engulfed Croatian politics over the past months, turned to Josipovic who had promised to usher in "the return of morals into politics."

The 52-year-old legal expert and classical music composer won the presidency with his programme of 'New Justice' insisting on an uncompromised fight against corruption and the rule of law.

Josipovic has pledged he would make Croatia a "shining star" of Europe by installing democratic values. Zagreb hopes to join the European Union by 2012.

"This country needs optimism and it is possible only if we manage to show good results in the fight against corruption and crime as well as prove that it is possible to find a way out of the economic crisis," he told local press.

Overcoming corruption is a key challenge if Croatia -- which joined NATO last year -- wants to succeed in its EU bid and put the trauma of the Balkan wars of the 1990s further behind it.

Early in the presidential race observers said Josipovic lacked charisma, but the bookish intellectual made the most of his boring image by presenting himself as a Croatian Mister Clean, untarnished by political scandal.

Josipovic's friends say his most important virtues are good organisation, discreetness and modesty, despite the fact that he has achieved top results in three different fields that marked his life -- politics, law and music.

"I am interested in different areas and I'm pretty good in them. I do not regret that I deal with so different things since I know that when we talk about music I'm no Mozart," he said.

Josipovic was born and educated in Zagreb, where he graduated with law and music degrees. He specialised in criminal and international criminal law, lecturing at Zagreb University's law faculty.

In 1980 he joined the League of Croatia's Communists (SKH), which reformed itself ahead of the 1991-1995 war that followed Zagreb's declaration of independence from Yugoslavia. The former communist party changed its name to the Social Democrats and at the time Josipovic wrote its first statutes.

Josipovic left politics in 1994 but returned to parliament in 2003. During his nine-year hiatus he worked as an international law expert on issues concerning Zagreb's cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, which is prosecuting war crimes from the 1990s Balkan conflicts.

He was also involved in Croatia's genocide complaint against Serbia for its role in Croatia's 1991-1995 war, which left some 20,000 people dead, before the International Court of Justice, the UN's highest court.

Josipovic will be Croatia's third president since the country's independence, succeeding the popular centrist Stipe Mesic, who steps down after serving his maximum two five-year terms in office and guiding the country to a parliamentary democracy after the authoritarian rule of independence leader Franjo Tudjman.

Josipovic is married and has an 18-year-old daughter. In his free time he composes classical music pieces for multiple instruments, some of which have won international awards. He has said he is considering writing an opera about the murder of Beatles singer John Lennon.