Yesterday Croatian voters’ cast ballots to elect third Croatian president. As expected none of the candidate managed to obtain absolute majority thus new president would be elected in the second round on January 10th. As pools were suggesting social democrat candidate Ivo Josipovic took comfortable lead, as according to preliminary figures he got 32.4% support from electorate suggesting strong starting point ahead of the second round. Race for the remaining spot in the second round, as pools suggested has been tight with three candidates being relatively close. In the end former SDP member, major of Zagreb, as independent candidate took second place with rather comfortable margin winning 14.8% of votes. Third place went to ruling CDU candidate Andrija Hebrang that took just above 12% of votes, thus outperforming majority of the pre-election pools. While another strong independent candidate Nadan Vidosevic took fourth place taking 11.3% of the votes. Elections were also characterized by low electorate response as only 44% of total electorate voted. Clearly given strong country wide support SDP Ivo Josipovic enters the second round with some advantage and overall confirms strong social democrats positions. Nevertheless upcoming days would provide more insight how votes from drop out candidates would be reshuffled among the two remaining candidates. As for the markets no significant reactions is to be expected as results mainly aligned with pools and in political terms presidential position has somewhat limited role in political decision making.