ZAGREB, September 15, 2018 - The GONG election monitoring nongovernmental organisation on Saturday organised a round table discussion on ways to find balance between direct and representative democracy, and among the topics discussed were also recent referendum campaigns aimed at changing the election law and annulling the ratification of the Istanbul Convention.
"Political institutions in Croatia are not based on a clear and long-term vision of the goals they want to achieve," Nenad Zakošek, chair of the GONG Council, said at the event that was held on the occasion of the International Day of Democracy, September 15. In that context, GONG proposes the establishment of six constituencies for parliamentary elections, with different number of seats and their borders corresponding to the country's administrative and territorial structure in the sense that some counties would be merged.
The NGO also advocates the introduction of three preferential votes with a 5% threshold as a way of increasing the influence of voters in the election process, the establishment of a single database on donations, donors and financial reports that would be easy to go through, as well as ensuring that relevant professionals sit in bodies in charge of implementing elections.
GONG believes that one should define by law which matters cannot be decided at referendums, as well as change current rules to make the launching of a nation-wide referendum easier. It proposes reducing the number of signatures required to call a referendum from 10% to 5% of the electorate, as well as extending the deadline for the collection of signatures in referendum campaigns, with the deadline for a nation-wide referendum being at least two months and for a local referendum one month.
Commenting on the checking of signatures collected by the "People Decide" and "Truth About the Istanbul Convention" civil initiatives, which is being done for the Public Administration Ministry by the APIS company, Assistant Minister Mladen Nakić said that "signatures do exist, but there is no information on where those signatures were collected, which is making the checking process more difficult."
Luka Mlinarić of the "People Decide" civil initiative accused Public Administration Minister Lovro Kuščević of "using his political position to state untruths during the signature-gathering drive", to which Nakić responded that the initiative's representatives had been invited to talks, but preferred "making a show at a news conference."
"We cannot let you see information that is protected as personal data. Can you guarantee that all signatures were legally collected? There are indications that nine-month-old babies signed your petition, as did deceased people," Nakić told Mlinarić.
Mlinarić noted that balance should be found between representative and direct democracy and called for introducing a threshold-free preferential voting, which, he said, would contribute to a better competition and closer communication between candidates and voters.
"We should define the goals we want to achieve as well as ask ourselves what can be changed because Croatia has become a blocked society where changes are very difficult, and if they do happen, they happen because of pressure from outside," said Josip Kregar of the Zagreb Faculty of Law, noting that the government was unstable because the election process had degenerated. "The election system is adapted to people in power and any change meets with major opposition... A party president compiles slates on his own, threatens elections to intimidate and discipline his party colleagues, and such discourse cannot result in any good solution," said Kregar, calling also for banning pre-election coalitions.
Berto Šalaj of the Faculty of Political Science said that those who claimed that citizens were not competent had not done anything to improve their political competence. "We still don't have civics in schools and in that regard there is no difference between the HDZ and the SDP," Šalaj said, noting that the political class was entirely closed to the idea of referendum and "is shunning direct democracy when it should actually open up to it."
"The political class in Croatia is gradually losing power just as politics as a human activity is losing relevance," said Milorad Pupovac, leader of the Independent Democratic Serb Party. He added that some other classes - clerics, tycoons and war veterans - had become powerful. "Clerics have become one of the most powerful social classes - in the media, education, health, army and police," said Pupovac.
