Željko Glasnović


Željko Glasnović is a former Croatian military officer and far-right politician. He was a member of Croatian Parliament's club called Independents for Croatia.

Biography

He was born in Zagreb in 1954 in a family of Kosovo Croats. His family emigrated to Canada in 1962, where he became a member of the Canadian Army, in which he served for five years. The next year and a half he spent in the French Foreign Legion. He fought in the Gulf war.
Following escalation of the Croatian war for independence, he returned to homeland and joined the Croatian National Guard in 1991. He was a military commanding officer in Lika, but after the Fall of Vukovar in November 1991, he was moved to Tomislavgrad, where he joined Battalion "Zrinski". He was severely wounded around the heart in the Battle of Kupres. His soldiers transported him from Bugojno to Franciscan monastery in Rama. The next two months he spent in a Split hospital but he escaped and returned to the Kupres front. He was known as a very strict commander demanding a high level of discipline.
In 1994, he became commanding officer of 1st brigade of the Croatian Defence Council. He participated in Cincar operation and Operation Storm. President Stipe Mesić retired him in 2000.

Politics

He was not politically active until the 2015 Croatian parliamentary election. He was elected into the Croatian Parliament as a member of Patriotic Coalition in IX district, reserved for Croatian diaspora. During his first MP term in 11th electoral district, he was member of the Committee on Croats outside the Republic of Croatia, War Veterans Committee, Interparliamentary Co-operation Committee and Delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the NATO. Although he was elected on HDZ list, he was not a member of the party.
For the 2016 elections he formed independent list and won one seat in Croatian Parliament representing the diaspora. Presently, he joined Independents for Croatia.
He is calling upon lustration and decommunisation of Croatia.

Honorary guest at the German extreme right wing congress

In 2018, he was an honorary guest at a party congress of the ultranationalist National Democratic Party of Germany in the town of Büdingen. On the congress, he confirmed for the media that NPD members fought alongside him during the Croatian war of independence and Bosnian war. He stated that during the 1990s war “they fought for the values of the West, Christianity, moral integrity, working habits and identity”. He added that he shared NPD’s world view, in particularly “patriotism, nation, religion and shared European values”. When asked if he was a Neo-Nazi – how usually the NPD party is referred to – he refused to directly reply to the question, but added that he is much closer to NPD, than to “communists” from Croatia “who are under a mask of cosmopolitanism and democracy”.