Račan resignes as party head

Račan resignes as party head

"Faced with a serious illness, I'm now continuing my battle for life," Račan said in a statement issued from a Zagreb hospital. "You will have to go on without me," he told members of his center-left Social Democratic Party.

As prime minister in 2000-03, Račan led Croatia's first pro-Western government after President Franjo Tudjman's authoritarian and nationalist rule.

He became an emblem of Social Democratic Party, the largest in Croatia's opposition. His absence could hurt its standing in polls, many of which show it just behind the governing conservative Croatian Democratic Union, with some even putting it in the lead.

Croatia has scheduled parliamentary elections for November.

Račan was born in 1944 in a Nazi labor camp in Ebersbach, Germany. In the communist-run former Yugoslavia, he was a Communist, but later transformed his party into a pro-Western, center-left group.