August the 28th, 2022 - Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic rarely has a good word to say about Croatia, and his recent statement that Croatia is 200 years ahead of Serbia in the economic sense came as quite a surprise, despite it being quite the backhanded compliment.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, on Saturday, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic proposed current Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic as his candidate for the composition of the new Serbian Government, announced the postponement of the Pride Parade, and also said that the Republic of Croatia had always been economically more advanced than Serbia, both during the time of Yugoslavia and even back when Serbia was under the rule of the Turks.
"Croatia has always been ahead of us economically, they have always been more developed in that area. I'm speaking economically, I wouldn't want to talk about them being more developed in any other sense. I cannot make up for 200 years of Serbia lagging behind, it just isn't realistic," said Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, speaking about the economic development of Serbia and the countries of that country's immediate region, which are also the countries surrounding Croatia. At the beginning of a long press conference in which he touched on various topics, using an interactive board as an aid.
Speaking about Serbia's GDP, Aleksandar Vucic said that Serbia will have almost doubled its GDP by the end of next year, while claiming that neighbouring Croatia didn't even increase theirs by 50 percent.
"Croatia will continue to be richer, but the wage gap will decrease. Today, they have an average salary of 1,100 euros, and we have 635. It's no longer three to one. We are slowly getting closer to them. They are a successful country and there is no need to philosophise in that regard,'' said Aleksandar Vucic.
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