ABSTRACT
As communism began to crumble and as Slobodan Milosevic played the nationalist card in Serbia, Tudjman formed the Croatian Democratic Union (CDU, HDZ in Croatian) in 1990, championing Croatian nationalism. In multiparty elections for the Croatian legislature on April 7 and May 6-7, 1990, the CDU emerged as the largest party, with 42 percent of the vote. It won 205 of the 356 seats in the Sabor (assembly). The Communist Party (League of Communists of Croatia-Party of Dem ocratic Reform) received the second-largest number of votes. Tudjman was elected president. Although he ap pointed a Serb vice president, the Serbs of independent Croatia, especially those of the Krajina, the old military borderland to which the Austrians had invited Serbian warriors in the seventeenth century, feared Ustasa-like ethnic intolerance. Tudjman had spoken of a Croatia for the Croatians, and the new flag of Croatia bore the checkerboard sahovnika emblem utilized by the Ustasa.
