Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said on Wednesday that the current legislation on referendum petitions has many deficiencies and therefore a new law on this matter will be drawn up.

“It seems to me that, considering the fact that the current regulations have many deficiencies, it would be good to start drawing up a new law on referendum petitions, which would regulate in a more precise and clearer way everything that is now regulated insufficiently. I think that most of the general public agree with that,” Plenkovic said at a cabinet meeting after the public administration ministry notified the government that two civil initiative groups failed to collect a sufficient number of signatures for their referendum petitions.

For a nation-wide referendum to be called, the two groups had to collect at least 374,740 valid signatures for each of the two petitions.

Public Administration Minister Lovro Kuscevic said at the government meeting that The People Decide civil initiative, which has been calling for a referendum on electoral changes, collected 412,325 signatures for its two-question petition, with 371,450 signatures being valid and 40,875 invalid.

The initiative collected 407,835 signatures for the referendum question that proposes stripping ethnic minority representatives of the right to decide on government formation and the state budget, and 367,169 signatures were valid and 40,666 invalid, according to Kuscevic.

The Truth about the Istanbul Convention civil initiative submitted 390,916 signatures for their referendum petition on repealing the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, with 345,942 valid and 44,974 invalid signatures.

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