The Croatian team’s favorite singer is a fascist salute away from the mainstream

BELGRADE, Serbia — When Croatian supporters flooded Toronto and Philadelphia this summer, draping city halls in the red-and-white checkerboards found on the Croatian coat of arms and belting out one power ballad after another, the loudest songs, as always, belonged to Marko Perković. “He’s become an inseparable phenomenon anytime Croatia plays or participates in any kind of competition, especially sporting events,” said Hrvoje Klasić, the leading Croatian historian focused on the legacy of World War II. “People both at home and abroad view him as synonymous with love for one’s country,” he continued. Better known as Thompson, after the submachine gun he carried in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, he is the country’s most popular singer — and its most enduring embarrassment. Croatian fans have made his song, “Lijepa Li Si,” the unofficial anthem of the team and a fixture at every match, a song whose chorus salutes the wartime Croat statelet in Bosnia whose leadership was convicted of war crimes. Thompson’s wider catalog is more explicit still. One track opens with “Za dom spremni,” the salute that functioned as Croatia’s answer to “Sieg Heil” during the World War II Ustashe regime. In the past, his concerts have been banned or canceled in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Slovenia, Austria and Germany. None of this is fringe within Croatia, however. Last summer Thompson drew more than 500,000 people to a single Zagreb concert, the largest in the country’s history, where fans chanted the same Ustashe slogan while the authorities looked away. In 2018, when Croatia nearly won the World Cup, the second-placed team was welcomed back with Thompson aboard the victory bus and star midfielder Luka Modrić personally asking for him to perform. Croatia has spent three decades declining to reckon with the Ustashe past, treating the fascist puppet state’s symbols as heritage rather than crime. Across post-communist Europe, the end of the Cold War brought a wave of historical revisionism,