ZAGREB, May 13, 2019 – The civil initiative “Take money from political parties” is starting to gather signatures as of midnight on Saturday for a referendum to end the financing of political parties from the state budget, its activists announced at a press conference in Zagreb’s main square.
The initiative calls for amending the Constitution to ban the financing of political parties from the central, regional and local government budgets. It will be gathering signatures until May 26.
Signatures will be gathered at more than 500 locations across the country by over 4,000 activists, half of whom are members of the opposition Živi Zid party.
” Živi Zid is the only party to have joined this initiative so far,” one of the organisers, Denis Martinić, said, calling on other parties to join them and “bring about true changes in society.”
Also attending the press conference were Živi Zid’s Ivan Vilibor Sinčić and Tihomir Lukanić.
“With this referendum we are doing away with the corrupt HDZ and SDP parties. We are ending a sad and dark period in Croatian modern history and starting to build a new system without parasitic parties, a system based on empathy rather than on corruption and materialism,” said Lukanić, Živi Zid’s secretary general and lead candidate for the European Parliament, calling on citizens to sign their petition.
“The money that the political parties receive from the state budget is taxpayers’ money, the money of all Croatian citizens,” Lukanić said. He called on citizens to consider whether they wanted their money to end up in the pockets of political parties that did not represent their interests.
Sinčić, the party’s leader and candidate for the European Parliament, called for radical changes to the political and electoral system.
“Now is the time to say a clear ‘no’ to the parties around the HDZ and the SDP. You have no results to show for yourselves, so you must go,” Sinčić said, stressing that the political system had to be more efficient, cheaper and more transparent.
More referendum news can be found in the Politics section.
