A FORMER Playboy model has announced she will be standing in Croatia's upcoming presidential election.

Ava Karabatić, 31, announced her candidacy in the January vote on social media, writing: "I can no longer watch bad things happen to my country."

Karabatić is a model and actress who has appeared in playboy as well as a number of Croatian films, including The Spring of Life (2016) and Tina & Sendy (2018).

She has previously spoken out on a number of political issues, calling for higher taxes and the legalisation of sex work to make the industry safer for the women involved.

"I have decided I will run for president," she wrote on Instagram.

"I have been given so many support messages on Instagram and I thank you for that.

"Politics is my second love.

"I can [no] longer watch bad things happen to my country.

"It is like everyone is blind with healthy eyes, our young people leave the country, birth rates fall.

Polls for the election are set to open between 21 December 2019 and 20 January 2020, leaving just 66 days before the first votes are cast.

Karabatić will be up against incumbent, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, who is running for a second five-year term, but European politics has seen upsets by political outsiders in the recent past.

In April, actor and comedian Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine after leading an insurgent campaign pledging to restore trust in politics.

Zelensky had previously played a fictional president on hit TV satire Servant Of The People.

'I KNOW I'LL GET COMMENTS FROM TROLLS'

As well as the legalisation of sex work, a manifesto posted by Karabatić online pledged to legalise marijuana, address the "problem of free movement of people", and reduce the time limit on abortions from ten weeks to six.

It also criticised the presence of corruption in Croatian politics and called for reforms to the state education system.

Fans responded to Karabatić's announcement by photoshopping pictures of her into a variety of political settings.

Her Instagram post continued: "I know I am going to have a lot of comments from trolls because I am a starlet, but that ignores my intellectual side where I am professor of Italian language and Roman literature.

"I wrote an autobiography, a novel, starred in a film that has been in the cinema for months, and in addition to acting, I became a painter too.

"Of course, my artistic abilities are not important, my new regime is, Ava's regime is important."

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