ZAGREB, December 9, 2019 – The incumbent President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, who is seeking a second term in office, said on Sunday that her challenger Zoran Milanović of the Social Democratic Party represented a return to “arrogance and rows” and that another of her rivals, singer-turned-politician Miroslav Škoro, was “playing the tamburitza in America” while the Homeland War was raging.
“I’m not bothered about ratings and opinion surveys. People will go to the polls on December 22 and show whether they want to return to the arrogance, hopelessness, divisions, rows and humiliation that we experienced … from the candidate Milanović or whether we want an experiment. I say maybe he wants the best, but you cannot enter politics that way, but we should simply maintain the continuity and people will recognise that,” Grabar-Kitarović told the press in the southern town of Sinj.
Asked to comment on Škoro’s message to voters from her Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party that he would be their president too, Grabar-Kitarović wondered where that came from so suddenly. “I have lived in my country since I was born and was here in the most difficult of times, in the early 1990s. Some people should be asked where they were when the going was tough. Some were playing the tamburitza in Amerika while we here were supporting our people and our troops.”
Responding to a journalist’s remark that exchanges between the candidates were increasingly being reduced to personal, Grabar-Kitarović said that this had been so right from the start. “I haven’t yet seen a single programme apart from my own. I’m trying to speak about my programme, but am forced to answer such questions simply because you’re asking me.”
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