ZAGREB, June 14, 2018 – The government on Wednesday rejected President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović’s initiative to participate in Croatia’s chairmanship of the European Union, telling Hina the prime minister represented Croatia in the European Council, but welcomed the possibility of the president contributing to the chairmanship programme.
The president said in Brussels earlier she wished “to contribute to the developing of the chairmanship because that is a matter of joint powers, notably when it comes to national security, immigration and all other foreign policy issues… The government has the capacities and the know-how to lead this process, primarily in terms of technical details and policies. That’s something I won’t interfere in and will respect.”
“As the president herself said, the prime minister represents Croatia in the European Council. Under the constitution, the government runs the foreign policy, and the president and the government work together in shaping and implementing the foreign policy,” the government told Hina.
“The government is preparing the programme of Croatia’s chairmanship of the Council of the EU in the first half of 2020 and the president is welcome to contribute to the programme,” it added.
The government also reacted to president’s strange comments on EU’s freedom of movement policy. A unnamed government source told Hina on Wednesday evening it was unusual of President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović to say, on a visit to Brussels, that the free flow of people, one of the four pillars of the EU, was both an advantage and a shortcoming.
During her two-day visit in Brussels, Grabar-Kitarović gave a talk at the European Policy Centre on the five years of Croatia’s EU membership and said that the free flow of people was both an advantage and a shortcoming.
Mobility is good when people come back, but we now have a very strong negative population trend, she said, adding that leaving were people in whom Croatia had invested and who represented big capital given that human capital represented 70% of the total capital in developed countries.
She said it was estimated that between 320,000 and 380,000 people had left Croatia over the past five years and that Croatia’s population had dropped to below four million. The negative population trends are not due only to emigration, but a poor birth rate too, she added.
The government source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Hina on Wednesday “it is unusual for the president to say something like that during her visit to Brussels,” underscoring that the free flow of people was one of the four fundamental freedoms of the bloc, along with the free flow of goods, capital and services.
“Similar trends in the pace of the free flow of people have been recorded in other member states during their first years of membership. We expect the mobility of our citizens within the EU in the 21st century to be a two-way street and that after working or studying abroad, Croatian citizens would chose to return to the homeland,” the same source said, adding that the government was “working and creating conditions for this to be possible.”
“We can say that the EU as a whole has benefited from Croatia’s membership, while Croatia still has not,” Grabar-Kitarović said, adding that she had presented a set of population measures so as to create in Croatia the same conditions that existed in the countries to which people were emigrating.
