What did Croatia’s political parties do during the holiday break?
The new parliamentary season begins next week. The political parties, both ruling and those in opposition, are defining their strategies for 2018 and have launched the preparations for the always exciting Questions to the Ministers, which will mark the beginning of the parliamentary debate on Wednesday, reports N1 on January 14, 2018.
Three days before the return of MPs to the Parliament after a month-long break, MOST’s members gathered in Križevci. The party which, according to the polls, spent most of 2017 as the third strongest political party, entered the new year in fourth position. They gathered at a two-day meeting to define this year’s strategy.
“Soon we’ll publicly announce a set of new proposals in the field of entrepreneurship, as well as an action plan for public administration reform. These are the first two initiatives, and we will continue to work on the reform of the judiciary, in order for the system to be more just and transparent,” said MOST president Božo Petrov.
In the last parliamentary season, SDP suffered due to internal arguments and divisions, and it entered the new year with just 20 percent of voter support, according to the CRO Demoskop poll. They spent this weekend in Ogulin trying to mend fences and adopt a programme which should, at least they say, replace internal conflicts as the primary focus of their efforts.
The ruling HDZ, which currently has about 29 percent of voter support, will enter the new season bragging about the latest data on the stabilisation of the economy, budget surplus, and credit rating upgrade. These are the topics which the Prime Minister spoke about at a party gathering in Split over the weekend.
“Perhaps we don’t talk enough about this, because we live in a media context which puts emphasis on crisis, chaos, disaster, pessimism. But, if you look more carefully at the economic data, the situation is quite different. We have never had such a large budget surplus, and we should emphasise that at all levels of authority as the success of this government, of this parliamentary majority, and our HDZ. I expect you will repeat this,” said Plenković to his party members in Split.
At least he doesn’t have to worry about questions which will be posted by his MPs to ministers in the Parliament. Index.hr recently published a memo which was sent from the Prime Minister’s office to ministers, asking them to state which topics they would like to talk about in the Parliament so that appropriate questions can be given to HDZ’s MPs who will then “spontaneously” ask them on Wednesday.
SDP’s president Davor Bernardić is also not satisfied with the media, which he partially blames for his and his party’s dismal ratings.
The only party to enters the new year on a high note is Živi Zid, whose popularity has recently increased by several percentage points and which is now clearly the third most popular political party in Croatia.
