11 Years of Lider – The First Issue Was Released in the Week of the Start of Negotiations for EU Membership

The first issue of Lider was released on this day, October 7, 2005. A lot has happened in those 575 weeks. It was precisely in the week of the release of the first issue that negotiations for Croatia’s entry into the European Union were opened. Today, the Union – burdened by the migrant crisis and after Brexit – is on the path to returning its numbers to the ‘pre-Croatian era’.

In Croatia, we have meanwhile survived the phase of ‘rapid’ growth, which, buoyed by road construction, was still slower than competing countries in the region, but we faced the bursting of the global financial bubble with enormous repayments for unproductive infrastructure investments. Then we encountered a recession, which politicians long refused to acknowledge, and Croatia was hit the hardest and longest. Seven lean years were fatal for a vast number of companies and jobs.

I am proud that Lider has managed to survive among those ‘remnants of remnants’ of Croatian business and reach today’s phase of fragile post-recession growth (again slower than countries in the region). In 11 years at the helm of Croatia, we have seen Sanader’s HDZ (along with an episode featuring the appointed Jadranka Kosor), Milanović’s SDP, and Karamarko’s lawlessness, and now we await Plenković’s era.

We were admitted to NATO, and after eight years of negotiations, we finally entered the EU (someone said – as if we crashed a party at dawn where the best fun has passed and where guests are already dispersing). All the while, Lider has analyzed and criticized the moves of all ruling coalitions. In a permanent clinch, both politics and Lider had one constant. Politics did not want to be a service to the economy but squeezed it to the last tax penny to pay for expensive state spending. And we have constantly explained that the solution is not in spending, but in production, and that for the global market. And so we will, I am convinced, continue for at least the next 11 years.