Prizmic, HRT Candidate, Silent on Serbia Fine
Fran Juraj Prizmic, a candidate for HRT director, has admitted to a car crash in Serbia but refuses to say whether he was fined for it, as the HDZ deletes traces of his party role.
One of six candidates for director of Croatian Radiotelevision has admitted that he was in a car accident in Serbia last year, but he refuses to say whether he was also fined for it on Serbian territory. Fran Juraj Prizmic, a producer and Zagreb HDZ official, insists the incident has nothing to do with his bid to lead Croatia’s largest media house, while the public is still waiting for an answer to whether the episode on a Serbian highway carried any legal consequences.
Who Are the Other Candidates, and Who Picks the Director?
Prizmic was born in 1988 in Zagreb and is the only one of the six applicants who does not come from within HRT itself. Alongside him, Zlatan Avar, Gordana Grandov, Drazen Miocic, Mario Raguz and Tomislav Stengel have also applied for the top job at HRT. The director is chosen by the Croatian Parliament, by a majority vote of all lawmakers, on the recommendation of the parliamentary committee that oversees information, IT and media, which first interviews each applicant. The broadcaster’s supervisory board has already ruled that all six applications are legally valid, so the next step is for the candidates to appear before that parliamentary committee, though no date for the hearings has been announced yet.
What Did Prizmic Say About the Crash in Serbia?
Prizmic confirmed to the news outlet Istra24 that he was in a car accident in Serbia last year. According to that outlet, he fell asleep at the wheel and hit a highway guardrail. Asked whether he was fined for it in Serbia, he declined to answer.
“That event has nothing to do with my candidacy for the director’s position. I have not been fined in the Republic of Croatia,” Prizmic told Istra24, a statement that addresses only the Croatian justice system and sidesteps the question about Serbia entirely.
When reporters pressed him on whether he was fined specifically in Serbia, where the crash actually happened, they got the same answer in a different form. “I don’t want to answer that question because it has nothing to do with my candidacy,” he told Istra24. He also declined to discuss any details of the incident itself, including the circumstances under which he fell asleep behind the wheel.
Deleted Posts About His Party Role
Alongside the questions about the crash in Serbia, a second, unrelated issue has surfaced, this time about the transparency of his political role. On June 30, Prizmic was elected head of the Working Group for Culture and Media of the Zagreb HDZ. The news outlet Index.hr reported that after his HRT candidacy became public, posts mentioning that position disappeared from several party profiles, including posts from HDZ Mlinovi, a branch operating within the Zagreb HDZ, and from its president, Marko Erdeljac.
Maja Sever, president of the European Federation of Journalists, flagged the deletions in a statement to Index.hr:
“It’s touching to watch the HDZ and its members delete publicly available posts that showed candidates’ party positions or political activity,” Sever said.
Her remark feeds into a broader question hanging over Prizmic’s candidacy: whether someone who chairs the ruling party’s culture and media working group should be running for the top job at a public broadcaster whose independence from politics that same party, through parliament, is supposed to guarantee.
Why Serbia Has Already Come Up in His Writing
This is not the first time Prizmic’s name has come up in a Serbian context. In September 2025, during an online clash with writer Miljenko Jergovic, he wrote that Jergovic listens to the “bosses at Nemanjina 11,” a reference to the address of the Serbian government’s headquarters in Belgrade. That remark, in which he publicly tied a Croatian writer to influence from Belgrade without offering any evidence, now sits in the same biography as his own, far less comfortable question: what exactly happened on a Serbian highway, and whether it cost him anything.
Before the final vote in the Croatian Parliament, candidates must first appear before the parliamentary committee, and it remains an open question whether Prizmic will have to be more forthcoming with lawmakers than he was with reporters from Istra24.
