Ivo Josipović (pronounced [ǐːʋo josǐːpoʋitɕ] ; born 28 August 1957) is a Croatian academic, jurist, composer, and politician who served as the president of Croatia from 2010 to 2015.
Josipović entered politics as a member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ), and played a key role in the democratic transformation of the League of Communists of Croatia (SKH) into the Social Democratic Party (SDP) as the author of its first statute. He left politics in 1994, but returned in 2003, winning a seat in the Croatian Parliament running as an independent candidate on the SDP party list. He won re-election to parliament as a member of the SDP in 2007. In addition to politics, Josipović has also worked as a university professor, legal expert, musician and composer, and holds a Ph.D. in Law and advanced degrees in music composition.
Following the end of his first term in Parliament in January 2008, he ran in the 2009–10 presidential election as the candidate of the Social Democratic Party of Croatia (SDP), which he had rejoined in January 2008. In the first round he topped eleven rivals with 32.4% of the vote, and entered the run-off with independent conservative populist candidate and Mayor of Zagreb, Milan Bandić, who had secured 14.8%. He won the election with 60.26% of the vote in the second round of the election.
His campaign was titled "Nova pravednost" (New Justice), calling for a new legal framework to address deep social injustice, corruption and organised crime. This included protection of individual rights and promotion of fundamental values such as equality, human rights, LGBT rights, justice, diligence, social empathy and creativity. Josipović was inaugurated on 18 February 2010, at St. Mark's Square in Zagreb. His term officially began at midnight on 19 February.
Josipović sought reelection in the 2014–15 presidential election held on 28 December 2014. He was supported by the centre-left four-party Kukuriku coalition, led by the SDP. Josipović won 38.46% of the vote in the first round, finishing narrowly ahead of conservative HDZ candidate Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović. They entered a run-off, which took place on 11 January 2015 and which Josipović ultimately lost by a slim margin of around 32,500 votes, winning 49.3% of the vote to Grabar-Kitarović's 50.7%. He is the first President of Croatia not to be reelected to a second term.
Josipović's parents, originally from Baška Voda, a small town near Makarska in Dalmatia, had moved to capital Zagreb in 1956, about a year before he was born. As a high school student, Josipović attended both the V. Gymnasium and a secondary music school in Zagreb from 1972 to 1976. As a teenager he was a promising football player. He is married to Tatjana, a civil law professor and legal expert. They have one daughter, Lana (born c. 1991).
Apart from his native Croatian, he speaks English fluently and has some understanding of German.
Josipović attended the Faculty of Law of the University of Zagreb, from which he graduated passing his bar examination in 1980. He completed his MA in criminal law in 1985 and his PhD in criminal sciences in 1994. He began as a lecturer at the same law faculty in 1984, and has since become a Professor for criminal procedure law, international criminal law and misdemeanour law.
Josipović has been a visiting researcher at a number of prestigious institutes including the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg in Breisgau, Germany, the Institute for Criminal Law of the University of Graz, Austria, as well as the HEUNI Institute (European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control) in Helsinki, Finland. He has also spent time as a private researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and Private International Law in Hamburg, Germany as well the Yale University in the United States. As member of several domestic and international legal and artists' associations he published over 85 academic and professional papers in domestic and international journals. In year 1994, he co-founded the independent Hrvatski pravni centar (Croatian Law Center). Josipović helped to save 180 Croatian prisoners of war from Serbian detention centers and has represented Croatia before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). He participated in several international projects and acted as a Council of Europe expert in evaluation of prisons in Ukraine, Mongolia and Azerbaijan.
After graduating from a secondary music school he enrolled at the Composition Department of the Zagreb Music Academy under the tutelage of renowned scholar Stanko Horvat. He graduated in 1983 majoring in composition. Between 1987 and 2004 Josipović was also a lecturer at the Zagreb Music Academy.
Josipović composed some 50 chamber music pieces for various instruments, chamber orchestra and symphony orchestra. In 1985 he won an award from the European Broadcasting Union for his composition "Samba da Camera" and in 1999 he was awarded the Porin award for the same composition, which was followed by another Porin award in 2000 for his piece titled "Tisuću lotosa" (A Thousand Lotuses). His most successful pieces also include "Igra staklenih perli" (The Glass Bead Game) and "Tuba Ludens". These pieces are performed by numerous musicians in Croatia and abroad. Since 1991 Josipović also served as director of the Music Biennale Zagreb (MBZ), an international festival of contemporary classical music.
During the 2010 election campaign Josipović announced that as president he would compose an opera based on the murder of John Lennon. On April 22, 2023, Josipović's opera, Lennon, about the last days of John Lennon, the people who were important to him, and a psychological profile of his murderer, premiered in Croatia's National Theatre.
Josipović was interviewed in Boris Malagurski's documentary film The Weight of Chains 2 (2014). Josipović lent his voice to the third film of the Toy Story series and in a short animated film Night and Day. Josipović at the beginning of the film pronounces the sentence, in Croatian, "Best things in life are unknown, turn to new things". Opening the Pula Film Festival, in 2014, President Josipović called for the audience to enjoy movies and art. "For some, film is the most beautiful and noble fraud, while for some, filmmakers are magicians. Indeed, they put in a big hat under the stars a lot of important spices and most importantly the talent and love for the art", said Josipović.
In 1980, Josipović became a member of the League of Communists of Croatia (SKH). He played a vital role in the democratic transformation of this party as the author of the first statute of the Social Democratic Party of Croatia (SDP). In 1994, he left politics and the SDP, dedicating himself to law and music. Upon the invitation of Ivica Račan, acting prime minister at the time, he returned to politics in 2003 and became an independent MP with the SDP and vice-president of the SDP representatives' group in the Croatian Parliament. During his mandate in 2005, he was also a representative in the Assembly of the City of Zagreb. In 2007, he was re-elected to the Croatian Parliament. He formally renewed his SDP membership in 2008. On 12 July 2009, he was elected as the party's official presidential candidate. As MP, he served on various parliamentary committees dealing with legislative, judiciary and constitutional questions, as well as for defining parliamentary rules of procedure and the political system.
After serving two consecutive five-year terms, the incumbent president Stjepan Mesić was not eligible to run in the scheduled 2009 presidential election. On 20 June 2009, Josipović was nominated as one of the official SDP candidates for the 2009–10 Croatian presidential election. He won in a primary against Ljubo Jurčić on 12 July, becoming the party's official candidate.
Josipović based his campaign on the slogan 'Justice for Croatia' and kicked off his campaign with a rally in front of the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb. He attacked the current Croatian government and the Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor for ignoring the needs of the little man and criticized her for not dealing with corruption.