ZAGREB, July 9, 2020 – Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic whose Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) scored a convincing victory in Sunday’s parliamentary election, said in an interview with the Vecernji List daily on Thursday that a majority of the ministers in his current cabinet would be in the next government.
“Let us conduct internal consultations for a few more days so as to complete the new architecture of the Croatian government. There will be fewer ministerial departments, which means fewer ministers. We are going to conduct some mergers, taking into account the functionality and closeness of the areas of responsibility of certain ministries,” said Plenkovic, who is to be the Prime Minister-designate after the elections.
“We are looking for solutions that will help us to form a compact and easy-to-manage government,” Plenkovic said, adding that in the outgoing government there were 20 ministers plus prime minister, and this number of people made it more difficult to coordinate the cabinet.
Considering the ambition of ethnic minorities’ parliamentary deputies to have their representatives in the next government, Plenkovic said that this topic had not yet been discussed.
As far as other partners of the next government are concerned, the HDZ policy is to talk with parties that have similar worldviews and with those who have programmes congruent with the HDZ platform.
“My aim as the prime minister and the HDZ leader is to reduce tensions and divisions in the Croatian society,” Plenkovic said adding that he could hold talks with all protagonists and that it was his duty to talk to everyone.
“It will be good that some other people also widen their margin for talks and communication technologies. If tensions are defused and if one scraps concepts that are not normal, then we can hold talks,” Plenkovic said in reference to the possibility of the HDZ cooperation with the Homeland Movement party led by Miroslav Skoro and the Bridge party led by Bozo Petrov. Plenkovic said that cooperation could be possible provided that the two parties gave up their blackmailing rhetoric.
