On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Croatia's EU accession, two trade unions warned on Sunday about the country's economic, social and existential regression, and called on Croatia's top politicians to change their discourse within the EU.
“Croatia has no alternative to European Union membership, but Croatian politics must have an alternative in the European Union,” the Association of Croatian Trade Unions and the Independent Union of Science and Higher Education said in a press release.
Although EU membership has “strategic geopolitical, economic and security advantages which it would be unreasonable to give up,” this does not mean that Croatia must not have its own voice in the EU, they said. It is paradoxical that since joining, Croatia has regressed economically, socially and existentially, they said.
Citing some paradoxes, the unions say Croatia has dropped to the bottom of EU development rankings, higher education has declined due to “academic cronyism,” the relationship to labour has been undermined, reducing labour to an unimportant category, and the government is cheating its citizens, not honouring its contractual obligations towards them, which the unions say it did not do five years ago.
National existence is also undermined by emigration, the causes of which should be sought at political level and resolved jointly with the countries with similar problems, the unions said. Social regression is evident in higher political control over the public media sphere and the marginalisation of criticism, they added.
Legal uncertainty has increased over the past five years, eroding citizens’ trust in institutions and justice as well as destroying the stability of the state, politics has reduced social dialogue to an irritating formality, while its relationship towards science and education has pushed the country into civilisation’s background, the unions said.
They ascribe the responsibility for the social degradation in part to the European Commission’s “neoliberal errors” and the incomplete and weak European structures, but believe it mostly lies with “domestic political and social forces.”
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