Politics

The Croatian team’s favorite singer is a fascist salute away from the mainstream

Published

1 day ago

July 2, 2026

BELGRADE, Serbia — When Croatian supporters flooded Toronto and Philadelphia this summer, draping city halls in the red-and-white checkerboards found on the Croatian coat of arms and belting out one power ballad after another, the loudest songs, as always, belonged to Marko Perković.

“He’s become an inseparable phenomenon anytime Croatia plays or participates in any kind of competition, especially sporting events,” said Hrvoje Klasić, the leading Croatian historian focused on the legacy of World War II.

“People both at home and abroad view him as synonymous with love for one’s country,” he continued.

Better known as Thompson, after the submachine gun he carried in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, he is the country’s most popular singer — and its most enduring embarrassment.

Croatian fans have made his song, “Lijepa Li Si,” the unofficial anthem of the team and a fixture at every match, a song whose chorus salutes the wartime Croat statelet in Bosnia whose leadership was convicted of war crimes.

Thompson’s wider catalog is more explicit still. One track opens with “Za dom spremni,” the salute that functioned as Croatia’s answer to “Sieg Heil” during the World War II Ustashe regime.

In the past, his concerts have been banned or canceled in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Slovenia, Austria and Germany.

None of this is fringe within Croatia, however. Last summer Thompson drew more than 500,000 people to a single Zagreb concert, the largest in the country’s history, where fans chanted the same Ustashe slogan while the authorities looked away.

In 2018, when Croatia nearly won the World Cup, the second-placed team was welcomed back with Thompson aboard the victory bus and star midfielder Luka Modrić personally asking for him to perform.

Croatia has spent three decades declining to reckon with the Ustashe past, treating the fascist puppet state’s symbols as heritage rather than crime.

Across post-communist Europe, the end of the Cold War brought a wave of historical revisionism, as nations that felt their identity had been suppressed under communism recast neo-Nazi and far-right figures as patriots. Hungary, Ukraine and the Baltic states, as well as Croatia, have all made a version of this bargain, folding once-condemned nationalists into their modern national myths.

“These nations believe they were robbed of their national identities in the past century or are dissatisfied with their country’s present achievements, so they reach back into the past for themes from a more distinguished past,” Klasić concluded.

Politics

The populist trick that turned a soccer shirt into a campaign uniform

Published

43 minutes ago

July 4, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

MAGA-friendly Abelardo de la Espriella’s decision to make Colombia’s national soccer jersey a defining feature of his victorious right-wing presidential campaign has sparked a debate over the political ownership of national symbols.

While the yellow shirt has long been associated with moments of collective celebration, critics argue that its prominent use by a partisan candidate risks recasting it as a marker of political identity. A Bogotá judge even banned de la Espriella from wearing the jersey while campaigning before the June 21 vote.

After hearing from fans in Miami on Saturday night vociferously in support of de la Espriella and his unflinching law-and-order policies, Blue Light News spoke to two experts on Colombian politics who say the episode reflects a broader pattern seen in populist movements, where patriotic imagery is deployed to blur the line between support for the nation and support for a political project.

“In my view, he was very deliberately politicizing the national team’s shirt,” Eduardo Gamarra, professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University, said. “The Colombian jersey is one of the few symbols that can still claim to belong to all Colombians, across region, class and ideology. That is precisely why it is attractive to a populist campaign: it allows a partisan political project to present itself as the nation itself.”

“This is not unique to Colombia. Populist politicians around the world routinely try to appropriate national symbols. In the United States, MAGA politics has turned the American flag and other patriotic symbols into markers of partisan identity. In Venezuela, Chavismo also understood the power of national colors, patriotic imagery and sporting symbols such as the Vinotinto [the national team],” Gamarra added. “De la Espriella’s use of the shirt was effective because it transformed the emotion around the national team into a signal of political belonging.”

“But to me the real surprise is not that de la Espriella tried to use the jersey, or even that it worked. The surprise is how ineffective opposition groups were in defending the shirt as a shared national symbol. They allowed a symbol that should belong to the whole country to be claimed by one political camp,” Gamarra said.

The jersey’s appeal, however, went beyond nationalism — helping to reinforce de la Espriella’s carefully crafted populist image ahead of the election final round that he won in mid-June.

“Abelardo de la Espriella used the national team’s shirt, traditionally a symbol of unity and celebration throughout the country, especially at the time of the World Cup, to associate his campaign with strong patriotism,” said Julian Gerez, assistant professor of criminology, law and society and political science at the University of California, Irvine. “But I think more importantly, it’s about de la Espriella’s own image: he is a multimillionaire lawyer but it is essential to his brand to appear as a man of the people. And as opposed to wearing a suit jacket or other formal attire, which is what might be expected, the jersey and hat play an important role in the way he portrays his image.”

“Ultimately, I think it was an effective tactic, but [leftist candidate] Ivan Cepeda’s campaign ironically made it more effective by coming out against its use, which led to greater awareness of the jersey as linked to de la Espriella’s campaign — and stronger defiance among his supporters in wearing the jersey,” Gerez added.