ZAGREB, December 14, 2019 – The Social Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, Zoran Milanović, said in Ogulin on Friday that Croatia should think carefully before introducing the euro because if it does it, it will lose its national currency for good “and the kuna is what it is, but it is ours.”
“Several countries that have been members of the EU for quite some time have not joined the euro area – the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. A housing loan in Greece, which has introduced the euro, is more expensive than at Zagrebačka Banka, where housing loans are more expensive than in Italy. So there are no right and unquestionable arguments about the introduction of the euro being the right thing to do,” he said.
Milanović also commented on insulting posters against him that he saw pinned to trees in Ogulin.
“I know what the message behind them is because there are people of Serb ethnicity here who have the same surname as I do … those are messages of intimidation. People (responsible for that) have been trading in fear for more than 20 years. They idolise a Communist general, Tito’s general, who was their leader, and they keep saying those senseless things,” Milanović said, accusing the ruling HDZ party of being behind the posters.
“That is not a normal Croatia,” he said, adding that the government was dealing with unimportant things and that other countries were outperforming Croatia in all areas.
He also spoke critically about the judicial system, saying that “thieves are not sentenced because of the expiry of the statute of limitations and lack of evidence, which is insulting.”
He also noted that health care could not be free but that it had to be available.
Calling on citizens to go to the polls on December 22, he said that since the start of his political career he had never enjoyed any preferential treatment and that he did not want anything for Croatia but to be a normal country “while the philosophy of the right, particularly the HDZ’s right, is a philosophy of proscription and social domination.”
Such an attitude “leads to rebellion and dissatisfaction, wars start when you treat people as second-class citizens, when you vilify entire nations or groups, which is what the HDZ does,” said Milanović.
More news about presidential elections can be found in the Politics section.
