ZAGREB, 14 Jan 2022 - Opposition Homeland Movement party deputy leader Mario Radić said on Friday that the results of the latest census showed that Croatia was perishing, with the largest population drops having been registered in peripheral counties due to lack of any state policy for those areas.
"Everything that has been happening to us, all the scandals - JANAF, Krš-Pađene, HNB - are resulting in Croatia's going to ruin and the only thing we are doing is trying to prove who is less responsible for it," Radić told a news conference, stressing that two parties (HDZ and SDP) had ruled Croatia and should therefore be held to account.
The first results of the 2021 census show that Croatia has a population of 3,888,529.
Radić recalled that in the 2011 census Croatia had 4.281 million people, noting that the current number of 3.88 million was a drop of around half a million.
Figures almost identical with those from the 1948 census
Radić noted that in 1991 Croatia had a population of 4.78 million, and that compared to that, the latest figure was a drop of almost 900,000. He said that the 1948 census showed an almost identical number of residents, 3.75 million.
As for the drop in the size of the population in individual counties, Radić said that the City of Zagreb did not have a decrease owing to internal migrations. He said that peripheral counties were the ones with the largest declines in the number of residents because there was no state policy to keep the population in those areas.
Homeland Movement MP Stipo Mlinarić of Vukovar said that the large population decreases in Slavonia were due to the HDZ's Slavonia, Baranja and Srijem project as there was no strategy for rural areas or improvement of life in those areas.
