ZAGREB, November 16, 2019 – The presidential candidate of the non-parliamentary Workers Front party, Katarina Peović, on Saturday pushed for 21st century democratic socialism which, she said, warned that some tenets of socialism should be taken and that this idea was increasingly popular in the world.
Speaking to reporters in Šibenik, she said this city and the coastal region of Dalmatia had been witness to “deindustrialization and touristification” for 30 years. She said that in socialism Šibenik had a developed industry, people had permanent jobs “and now they are all reduced to tourism.”
She said tourism had raised the region and the city but that one should ask what kind of jobs it offered because “salaries are lower, people have uncertain contracts, the jobs are all highly exploitative.”
Peović recalled Šibenik’s “history of revolution and fighting, and the modernist project that followed, when the country was industrialised in only a couple of decades.” She said that “after 30 years of devastation… it’s time we asked… why the entire industry has been shut down and in whose interest it is that our people can’t be anything else but maids and waiters.”
She said that in highly developed European countries tourism accounted for 4-5% of GDP, whereas in Croatia that was 20% and in Šibenik 50%, “which means that a bad tourism season reduces a whole city to poverty.”
She said Croatia must protect its economy and industry and “pursue an autonomous policy towards Europe, because of the agreements we have signed with the European Commission and because the free market doesn’t allow us on the periphery to develop.”
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