Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic fired her domestic policy advisor, Mate Radeljic, her office said in a press release on Friday.
Radeljic was Grabar-Kitarovic’s longest-serving advisor who has been on the post since taking office in February 2015. In the same announcement, Grabar-Kitarovic also sacked Dario Mihelin, her foreign and European policy advisor.
These follow the resignation of Vlado Galic, her former defence and national security advisor, who quit last Thursday.
According to Grabar-Kitarovic, Galic resigned for “ethical and moral reasons” after he was mentioned in the media as playing a part in the so-called Text Message Affair, which broke after former police IT expert Franjo Varga had been arrested in September on suspicion of producing forged text message correspondence for a number of prominent.
The Croatian weekly Nacional said in a November issue that Varga had told investigators he had been hired by the HDZ in 2014 to work on Grabar-Kitarovic’s election campaign. According to Nacional, which cited unnamed sources, Varga said he was contacted at the time by Vlado Galic himself.
The President refuted those allegations in November, saying that Varga had not worked on her campaign.
“According to what he (Galic) told me, he has nothing to do with the affair,” Grabar-Kitarovic said last week after Galic announced his resignation.
Since rumours of Radeljic’s departure surfaced this week, media began speculating that the decision to relieve him of duty had to do with Grabar-Kitarovic’s desire to improve her relations with the government and Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, in order to secure his support for her candidacy for the second term as president.
Radeljic’s name was most often mentioned in the context of the president’s criticism of the government’s work, so his departure may be motivated by Grabar-Kitarovic’s wish to improve her relationship with Plenkovic, Jutarnji List daily said on Wednesday.
The President’s Office announced on Friday that Mihelin will be replaced by diplomat Sebastian Rogac as the President’s advisor for foreign and European policy, while former television reporter and editor Mirjana Hrga will become her advisor on strategic policy and parliament and government relations.
This is the third major overhaul of the President’s advisor team since she took office in 2015, said the latest edition of Globus weekly, adding that Grabar-Kitarovic has replaced 12 people in 46 months of her term as president, meaning her former advisors stayed on their posts only four months on average.
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