Prime Minister Andrej Plenković is very careful not to say anything wrong in public appearances. He is a master at answering a specific question with a series of sentences that, while not providing a direct answer, will be impossible to quote and subject to criticism. However, at the last government session, the Prime Minister stumbled into deep waters. Commenting on the slowdown in GDP growth in the last quarter of 2017, he stated that this slowdown ‘was not felt in the budget itself’.
>>>Plenković: GDP is slightly lower than expected, but it was not felt in the budget
Unintentionally, Plenković revealed that for this government, as well as for all previous ones, the most important aspect of the informal strategy and work program is still that the budget is filled and that there is money for salaries and other needs of the state apparatus. Moreover, he should know that the regular filling of the budget is most likely a consequence of a significant increase in the import of goods and services in the last quarter. VAT is paid promptly on imports, so, since this is the most lucrative tax for filling the state treasury, it is really not surprising that GDP is slowing down while the budget does not yet feel it.
When nothing helps…
The Prime Minister’s thoughtless-awkward-honest statement is yet another proof that HDZ and the coalition that enables it to govern the country have significant problems with the program. In fact, it does not exist. Today, the ruling party will say that they have a National Reform Program. The inability to implement the reforms recorded in it and the obvious slowdown in growth indicate that Plenković must make a decision that may be even more difficult than those related to Agrokor: he must assess whether to stick to the existing model or embark on devising a new one that would not end up with the variant ‘we accelerate reforms so that growth becomes slower’.
>>>Dalić: We are in the ‘year of reforms’
An additional reason for HDZ’s reflection on the model until the end of the mandate is the surprising occurrence that two parliamentary parties, SDP and Most, atypically for local conditions, are trying to devise political-economic programs without it being just a few months before elections. An optimist would say that political thinking in Croatia has finally matured to the point where a serious political party should have a program that is not merely a convenient pre-election one. A realist would, however, note that the election results in Italy, along with the strengthening of the Living Wall here, have panicked some party leaders. Thus, the logic is applied: ‘when nothing helps, let’s write some kind of program instead of just outsmarting each other in parliament and the media on a daily basis’. The approaches of SDP and Most to articulating the program are completely different. SDP starts from the general to the specific, while Most seems to be going from a dozen partial policies perhaps towards a program that will hold water as a whole. This Saturday, Bernardić’s SDP is expected to accept the foundations that Davorko Vidović has contemplated.
