New Disagreements Between HDZ and MOST

More rumblings of discontent between the ruling coalition, now 18 days old.

There are new disagreements between HDZ and MOST which will be discussed at the next meeting of their Cooperation Council, which was supposed to take place yesterday, but was postponed. MOST demands that they have the right to appoint all the lower-ranking officials in “their” ministries, even though there was allegedly an initial agreement between the two parties that they will mix officials from both parties in all the ministries, reports Vecernji List on February 10, 2016.

This means that MOST is ready to accept HDZ’s deputy ministers in ministries where the minister comes from MOST, but it wants for all the assistant minister positions, as well as public companies’ supervisory boards in those sectors, to be staffed and managed by its representatives. So MOST reportedly wants to name supervisory boards in some of the largest and most important state-owned companies in Croatia – INA, HEP, Plinacro, Janaf, Hrvatske Vode, Hrvatske Šume…

HDZ is not ready to accept that demand, but wants instead to have some of its own people in those posts. Some claim that this is not actually a conflict between MOST and HDZ, but a conflict within MOST itself, since some of their people now want to secure positions for themselves. It is possible that Prime Minister Tihomir Orešković will have to get involved and ask MOST leader Božo Petrov to better control his members and respect what had been agreed earlier. However, sources from MOST claim that it had actually been agreed between the parties that they will cover the whole sectors, because that was the only way for the reforms to be implemented.

“We have insisted on those ministries which are key to reforms and now we want the tools to carry out promised reforms. How could we do it if there is one assistant minister from MOST, and another assistant minister from HDZ? HDZ will have to respect our strength because we are crucial for their majority in Parliament. We can always force the early elections”, said a source from MOST who is a member of the Cooperation Council.

Although MOST officially insists on public competitions for staffing the management teams in state-owned companies, there are some members of MOST who believe that the rules should be changed, since the public competitions would last for at least six months. “Time is short and we have to start working, so perhaps it would not be bad to change regulations”, said a MOST source.

HDZ is surprised by MOST’s new demands. “We have agreed a reciprocity principle with MOST and did not expect demands such as these. We will see how this will all be resolved”, said a HDZ source who is also a member of the Cooperation Council. Last week, the Cooperation Council announced that it would have the names of new deputy and assistant ministers ready by the end of this week, but it is doubtful whether that is possible anymore.

 

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