The civil initiative which had launched a petition to collect signatures for a referendum proposing changes to the national election law said on Tuesday evening it had collected the required number of signatures.

“The people have decided: We have a referendum”, said a Facebook post published by the civil initiative, which did not specify how many signatures it managed to collect in total.

According to Croatian law, the initiative, called The People Decides, had two weeks to collect some 375,000 signatures, or 10 percent of the registered electorate, in order to submit their proposal for the referendum. The petition collected signatures on May 13-27.

The initiative, backed by conservative groups, proposed amendments to Croatia’s election law, including re-drawing of constituencies, reducing the number of MPs from a potential maximum of 160 to 120, reducing the number of MPs representing ethnic minorities, and barring them from taking part in voting on forming of government and the national budget.

The initiative was criticised earlier this month by election monitoring NGO Gong, which said that reducing voting rights for only some MPs was against the parliamentary principle of equality of rights for all MPs.

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