Ivan Pernar

His grandfather's uncle, also named Ivan Pernar, was a member of the National Assembly of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes for the Croatian Peasant Party and was one of several Croatian politicians wounded by People's Radical Party MP Puniša Račić on June 20, 1928.

Ivan Pernar (born 14 October 1985) is a Croatian politician and activist.

Pernar joined the Green List in 2009.

Pernar finished 10th Gymnasium in Zagreb and then enrolled at University of Applied Health Sciences in Zagreb, where he earned Bachelor of Nursing degree.

Pernar has a son, Mathis Ivan Alexis, with a German woman named Friederike.

However, he was expelled from the party in November 2010.

In June 2011, he founded the Alliance for Change party, which later became Human Shield.

In February 2011, Vlasta Toth, the party's president at the time, told Večernji List that Pernar was expelled due to his political beliefs.

She claimed that while Pernar was a council member of the Green Party in Stenjevec, he told an audience of around 150 people during a panel on urbanism that "intellectual gossip doesn't lead to anything" and that "he read Mein Kampf from which he learned how to influence the masses."

Pernar responded to the Večernji List piece, admitting his reference to Mein Kampf.

"Hitler is a lunatic, and although I did not read his book entirely, I read only the part which discusses how, when sending a message to the masses, one needs to drop to the understanding of the small, ordinary man and the messages must be conveyed in simple words, not with complicated vocabulary and philosophizing. Because the people will never be able to understand if you use highly intellectual rhetoric. There, that's what I said in that discussion. I spoke about the approach to people and that civil associations complicate messages to people too much and that's why people don't understand them."

Pernar was one of the organizers of massive "Facebook protests" in 2011 aimed against the government under the administration of Jadranka Kosor.

The protests started in Zagreb, and then spread to all major Croatian cities such as Pula, Split, Rijeka and Slavonski Brod.

Despite initial success in mobilizing and leading as many as a thousand people, he soon came to the verge of being physically attacked by the same protesters in Osijek, for mongering people to burn a flag.

After the protests, he founded his own political party "Alliance for Changes", which soon changed its name to Human Shield.

Along with other members of his party, Pernar soon engaged in passive resistance to forced evictions in Croatia, for which he was, according to his own account often arrested by the police.

He was a member of Croatian Parliament from the 2016 elections to May 2020, having been elected in the 6th electoral district on the joint party list of Human Shield, Let's Change Croatia and Youth Action.

In the Croatian parliamentary election, in September 2016, Pernar won 15.66% of preferential votes of his constituency and thus entered the Croatian Parliament for the first time.

After one month of work, he became credited as the most active MP in Croatian Parliament by the Croatian media.

On November 29, 2016, Stjepan Vujanić, president of political party "Alphabet of Democracy", announced that Pernar would become a member of his party.

Pernar later explained that he made this move as a revolt because Croatian Ministry of Public Administration refused to register his new political party "The Only Option".

On October 11, 2016, he was criticized by parliament speaker Željko Reiner for eating pizza during a session.

On December 14, 2016, Pernar accused Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts of being "a decorative office, cultural poseurs and quasi-intellectuals" for not dealing with issues of relevance for Croatian society.

On January 20, 2017, Pernar and his party colleague Ivan Vilibor Sinčić became the first MPs to have been forcibly expelled from the parliament since Croatia's independence, after Pernar refused to leave the session on order of speaker Željko Reiner.

In January 2017, Pernar declared that he no longer identified as a Roman Catholic, and accused the Catholic Church in Croatia of being "the long arm of Croatian Democratic Union".

He criticized the Catholic Church for "banning marriage of clergy members, worship in front of statues, and the infallibility of the Pope".

In an interview with Total Croatia News, Pernar stood against the funding of the Catholic Church from the state budget, indicating that it caused a perverse incentive for the Catholic Church to participate in partisan politics:

"The money is being taken compulsorily from everybody, and then the clergy receives hundreds of millions of kuna. Then it is only logical that the clergy supports the Croatian Democratic Union in return."

When he was asked about his alleged impartiality to the Serbian Orthodox Church, Pernar said that the Orthodox Church "realized its mistake from the time when it advocated for nationalism, and it is not longer advocating that in Croatia."

Referring to the Republika Srpska Krajina as "the insurgency", Pernar added that "Orthodox priests took part in the insurgency, which ended catastrophically for the Serbian people."

Pernar and the Serbian Orthodox Church became a focus of the local press again on January 6, 2017, when he attended a Badnjak ceremony after having been invited by a Serbian Orthodox Church.

He later wrote on his Facebook page that "the Serbian Orthodox Church does not have the goal of bringing the Croatian Democratic Union to the government, and does not interfere with our politics and deals with religious questions. That cannot be said for the Catholic Church".

Index.hr reported that Pernar's writings received a series of chauvinist Facebook comments and that he was also called a "communist" by many readers.

In June 2019, he announced that he left the Human Shield party, that he founded in 2011, accusing the president of the party, Ivan Vilibor Sinčić and his wife of "turning the party into a private property".

At a press conference held in the Croatian Parliament, he stated that he had requested the deletion of the Human Shield membership and that he would set up a new party on 7 July 2019.

The party is called Party of Ivan Pernar.

He ran for president in the 2019 Croatian presidential election, finishing 7th after winning 2.31% of votes.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in Croatia, Pernar was accused of spreading and promoting misinformation.

On 11 August 2019, Ivan and his long-term partner Viktorija welcomed their first son named Noa.

The child was born healthy but due to the parent's views, the child was not vaccinated.