Big European expectations of the new Croatian government.
The new Croatian government will have a lot of work to do – that is a message from the EU headquarters in Brussels, regardless of who will finally form the government and what its ideological composition will be. Relationship with the Church, family issues and other values are not something that is being discussed in Brussels when a government is being formed in a member state, since within the EU there are major differences between countries about these issues and there is no single European model. But, Brussels does expect that the government will start long-delayed reforms that will ensure sustainable economic growth and reduce excessive deficit and public debt, reports Jutarnji List on December 25, 2015.
It is true that the outgoing government at the very end of its term has managed to turn the economic trends in a positive direction, so that Croatia is now officially out of recession. This has been recognized by the European Commission as well. However, the forecast growth rate is not sufficient to significantly improve economic situation in the country. That will require further efforts.
This year, Croatia at the last minute managed to avoid the activation of process of excessive economic imbalances, but this process can be activated at any time if the European Commission decides that Croatia is not taking measures to deal with underlying problems. It is certain that Croatia will fail to achieve the goals set within the excessive deficit procedure and will not reduce its public debt. Since there are some other EU countries which had similar problems and the European Commission was not lenient towards them, it can be expected that the EU will start putting pressure on Croatia and it will certainly insist on implementation of new specific measures.
Measures which are sought by the European Commission are not those reforms which have been mentioned during the pre-election campaign and the post-election coalition negotiations. The EU expects Croatia to focus on long-term and sustainable measures, instead of ad hoc one-off decisions. They concern the tax policy and pension and healthcare systems, and in particular the ways of managing public and state-owned companies, whose mismanagement and losses have significantly contributed to the increase in public debt. If the division of managerial positions in such companies really was the subject of coalition negotiations between political parties, that may bring trouble since the EU has warned that management selection criteria should be transparent and based on competence rather than political considerations.
For the new government there are no mysteries, since the recommendations made by the EU to Croatia are public and clear. Pre-election promises are one thing while reality is something completely different, so we will just have to wait and see what the policies and the budget of the new government will look like.
