Following multi-party elections held that April and May, Croatia's new Sabor (parliament) convened on May 30, 1990, with Franjo Tuđman's nationalist HDZ party in control. The session marked the effective end of one-party Communist rule in Croatia and set the stage for the declaration of independence a year later, a step that would help trigger the violent breakup of Yugoslavia.
Croatia's first multiparty elections since World War II delivered a decisive victory to the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), led by Franjo Tuđman, a former Communist general turned nationalist. When the new Sabor convened on May 30, 1990, it symbolized the rapid unraveling of Communist authority across Yugoslavia's constituent republics, mirroring similar transitions across Eastern Europe that year.
Tuđman's government moved quickly to assert Croatian sovereignty, adopting a new constitution and national symbols that alarmed the republic's Serb minority and the government in Belgrade. Tensions escalated through 1990 and into 1991, as Croatian Serbs, backed by the Yugoslav National Army, began arming themselves in border regions like Krajina.
Croatia formally declared independence in June 1991, igniting a brutal war that would last until 1995 and claim tens of thousands of lives. The convening of that first democratic parliament is remembered as the opening act of Yugoslavia's violent dissolution, a moment of democratic hope that curdled quickly into ethnic conflict.