He also hopes to visit Croatia soon.
The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, had one of his regular visits to the Ćirilica talk show on Serbia’s Happy TV yesterday, where he held a monologue on everything and everyone for two hours, with restrained and just occasional intervention by host of the show Milomir Marić, reports Index.hr on January 23, 2018.
Vučić talked about the situation in Kosovo after the murder of local politician Oliver Ivanović, the upcoming local elections in Belgrade, his government’s plans to build apartments and a number of other topics. After an hour and twenty minutes of speaking, he focused on relations with Croatia.
President Vučić first said that the population of Serbia was massively emigrating from some parts of the country, and then he quoted Croatia as a worrying example.
“I believe that I will soon visit Croatia, because we have to talk all together, in order not to argue anymore, to create the best possible conditions for people who will have a future here, so they do not move anywhere else. We have all emptied our territories. We complain about territories, but our country is empty. Eastern Serbia is empty; Western Serbia is empty,” Vučić said.
Then he began to list small towns in Serbia from which people were emigrating en masse, and said that people should not “talk only about Belgrade, but about whole Serbia.” He argued that the Serbian industry had been “ruined and looted during the privatization process,” and that once prosperous and populated parts of the state, like the Banat region, were “devastated” today, and that “people had fled to the countries of the European Union.”
Marić then noted that “the population of Croatia had fled after Croatia joined the European Union,” and asked what would happen when Serbia entered the EU.
“I am all for entering the European Union as soon as possible, but we have a bit of luck that we are not able to move forward much faster because we would lose the population even more quickly. People would get work permits and would leave without any problems. Just like citizens from Croatia today move in endless columns to Munich, Stuttgart and other cities of western Germany, but also to Ireland and many other countries. Just have a look at the Baltic countries, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia – they have been emptied, they have been emptied,” said Vučić, adding that Croatia’s “Slavonia is empty, just like eastern Serbia.”
Translated from Index.hr.
