Did Josip Broz Tito, president of the former Yugoslavia, say: "Congratulations. Really genius. First, you sold everything, and now you are replacing the population with foreigners"? No, that's not true: The audio has been edited. Tito died in 1980. Lead Stories found the original scene in a YouTube video of a 1980 documentary titled "Tito's Memoirs" in which Tito talks about his grandparents, not an alleged population exchange.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok on March 1, 2024, under the title (translated from Croatian to English by Lead Stories staff): "Daily dose of Josip Broz." It opened (as translated):
Congratulations. Really genius. First you sold everything, and now you are replacing the population with foreigners
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Thu Mar 7 09:10:38 2024 UTC)
In the video on TikTok, Josip Broz Tito is sitting in an armchair saying: "Congratulations. Really genius. First, you sold everything and now you are replacing the population with foreigners."
Lead Stories found the original footage of this scene in a YouTube video. The scene is from a 1980 documentary movie titled "Tito's Memoirs" (archived here), directed by Veljko Bulajić. At the 1:59 mark, the scene that is also used in the video on TikTok appears. Tito talks about dormouse hunting with his grandfather and about his grandmother, not about an alleged population exchange (as translated):
... he said, we won't eat the dormouse today, we'll eat something else. My grandfather was good to me, and so was my grandmother. She was an amazing woman, a tall woman and a very nice woman.
Furthermore, a search using Google News' index of thousands of credible outlets was conducted by Lead Stories on March 7, 2024, with the keywords, "Josip Broz Tito AND "Čestitam. Zaista genijalno. Prvo ste prodali sve, a sad radite zamjenu stanovništva sa strancima" (archived here), translated in English as "Josip Broz Tito AND congratulations. Really genius. First, you sold everything, and now you are replacing the population with foreigners." The Google search did not yield any results to confirm the claim. In addition, Josip Broz Tito died on May 4, 1980 (archived here).
The Great Replacement Theory (archived here), the idea that the elites are trying to replace white citizens with non-white immigrants, has been around since the late 19th century but gained momentum at the beginning of the 21st century.
More Lead Stories fact checks on the claims about population replacement in Croatia can be found here.
