“We have collected the signatures of 377,635 voters or the signatures, which is more than 10 percent of the electorate required to call a referendum,” the initiatives’s coordinator, Kristina Pavlovic, said in a news conference outside the Parliament and government buildings.

Pavlovic said the signatures would be submitted to the Parliament for an official re-count next week, and that the initiative would request that its representatives be present at the counting. The initiative also asked that the number of eligible voters that the percentage is calculated from gets reduced by the number of voters with residence in the cities of Rijeka, Pula and Gradac, where, it said, its campaigners had been prevented from collecting signatures by local authorities.

She said that close to 200,000 voters did not have the opportunity to sign the initiative’s petition because their mayors prevented them from doing so.

One of the main reasons the Catholic Church-backed conservative campaigners are opposed to the Convention is their claim that it introduces the concept of a third gender in national legislation.

Commenting on the Pride Parade held in Zagreb on Saturday, under the slogan “Long live gender”, Pavlovic said that it revealed the true meaning of the term ‘gender’ and its connection with the interests and goals of the LGBT lobby. Comparing that slogan with Yugoslav Communist leader Josip Broz Tito’s slogan “Long live work”, Pavlovic said that their similarity in the most obvious way linked the two ideologies – the communist one and the new, gender ideology.

She continued to draw parallels between the former communist regime and the political parties in the ruling centre-right coalition, led by the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, slamming them for supporting the ratification of the Convention in parliament earlier this year.

“Plenkovic’s HDZ fits into that story, too – it has shown that the Istanbul Convention which has been proved inefficient, and gender ideology, are more important to it (the party) than the position of the academic community, the Church, and almost 400,000 citizens who are seeking a referendum on the cancellation of the ratification of the convention. President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic and Prime Minister (Andrej) Plenkovic’s silence about the unlawful conduct of the mayors of Rijeka, Pula and Gradac did not stop us,” Pavlovic said, adding that the initiative would file a complaint with the Constitutional Court against the mayors’ withholding approval for the collection of signatures in public locations.