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Rijeka’s Antifascist Protest and the Mayor Who Saw Nothing

by Katarina Damčević

On 30 November 2025, around 2,000 people gathered in Rijeka for an antifascist protest, while masked men performed fascist salutes and intimidated participants. This blog post argues that the mayor’s refusal to take a stand creates space for the far right.

On Sunday, 30 November 2025, coordinated protests were held in several Croatian cities – Zagreb, Rijeka, Pula, and Zadar – under one message: Ujedinjeni protiv fašizma, United Against Fascism.1 What brought thousands into the streets was the recognition that extremist rhetoric, symbols, and intimidation tactics are once again being tolerated in public life without consequence.2 In my hometown, Rijeka, approximately 2,000 people gathered to push back against this trend. They marched because open invocations of the WWII Nazi and fascist Independent State of Croatia (NDH – Nezavisna Država Hrvatska) and the Za dom spremni Ustaša salute are no longer fringe provocations but increasingly visible claims to public space.3 Shortly before the march began, a group of masked men appeared, giving fascist salutes and throwing firecrackers at participants. Police eventually – though far more slowly than the situation warranted – removed them. It was not a spontaneous disturbance – it was a message, a performance of intimidation.4

Yet perhaps even more revealing than the provocation itself was the response issued by Rijeka’s mayor, Iva Rinčić. In her official statement issued after the march, she explained she did not attend the march because she “does not go to gatherings with masks and flags of a failed state”.5 The remark is as politically irresponsible as it is factually false. No one marched for Yugoslavia on Sunday. But far-right groups did signal and salute the NDH. To invert this reality is not neutrality – it is a rhetorical concession to precisely those forces the protest sought to confront.

This linguistic maneuver fits a broader pattern. Rinčić’s political persona was built on the absence of explicit positioning: a technocratic, managerial mayor who promised efficiency, modernity, and generational renewal, but avoided articulating any real worldview. The result is a peculiar form of institutional leadership – one that governs without affinity, and certainly without ideological commitment. But leadership without commitment is not neutral; it is structurally predisposed to accommodate the louder, more aggressive actors around it.

Her statement that “antifascism is no longer what its name suggests” further delegitimizes civic mobilization by framing it as an ideological spectacle rather than a democratic responsibility. It also implies that distancing oneself from antifascism is a sign of maturity or political sophistication – as if taking to the streets against fascism were an embarrassment or a relic. Once antifascism is coded as “ideological,” fascist nostalgia becomes reframed as just another opinion, another identity, another item on the menu of democratic pluralism. And as her statement suggests, the Za dom spremni crowd is then simply exercising its “view.”

But this is precisely how fascism has historically advanced. Not because fascists were immediately strong, but because the bourgeois center preferred distance, civility, and managerialism to confrontation. Workers marched; the bourgeoisie stayed home. Fascists marched too — and bit by bit, the streets became theirs.

One of the responses to the mayor put it plainly: her words were “neither harmless nor accidental”.6 It matters when a city’s symbolic authority refuses to stand with those who defend its most basic values. Every moment of institutional ambivalence widens the space in which the far right can operate and claim legitimacy. Sunday’s marches were not performances, nor nostalgic rituals. They were an urgent refusal to let the public sphere slide into relativism that invariably benefits the radical right. They affirmed that antifascism is not an ideological hobby but a democratic baseline.

If the mayor cannot articulate that baseline, the responsibility falls once again to those who take to the streets. And if she cannot – or will not – choose a side, the city must ask whether it deserves a mayor who refuses to see the difference.


  1. Ujedinjeni protiv fašizma_i u Rijeci prosvjed okupio gotovo 2000 ljudi []
  2. Half a Million Voices: Mainstreaming the Ustaša Legacy at Thompson’s Zagreb Concert []
  3. Public Statement of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Research in Southeast Europe (University of Rijeka) on the historical origins of the Za dom spremni salute []
  4. See Maskirani huligani pred marš protiv fašizma bacali petarde, dizali desnice. Uklonila ih policija and Marš protiv fašizma okupio 2.000 Riječana; u incidentu ozlijeđena djevojčica []
  5. Priopćenje gradonačelnice Rinčić nakon marša Ujedinjeni protiv fašizma []
  6. Otvoreno pismo gradonačelnici Rinčić: ‘Ono što kažete nije ni slučajno ni bezazleno. Distancirate se od vlastitog grada’ []

OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Katarina Damčević (1. Dezember 2025). Rijeka’s Antifascist Protest and the Mayor Who Saw Nothing. ostBLOG. Abgerufen am 21. Januar 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/1593b


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