Prime Minister and Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) leader Andrej Plenkovic said on Monday that he was going to talk with Vukovar mayor Ivan Penava of the HDZ, explaining that controlling HDZ policy is "not within the purview of Penava."

“The HDZ party policies are not within Penava’s purview. Activities related to the town of Vukovar are,” Plenkovic said after a meeting of the HDZ leadership in Zagreb on Monday evening.

Plenkovic’s comment came after Penava held a news conference on Monday, in which he attacked the Croatian Serb leader, MP Milorad Pupovac of the Independent Democratic Serb Party (SDSS) of pursuing the “Greater Serbia policy.”

His gave the news conference ahead of the 21st anniversary of the 1997 peaceful reintegration of Croatia’s Danube region, which includes the town of Vukovar.

Penava told reporters that there was a “continuity of the Greater Serbia policy in Croatia,” and went on to describe Vukovar as the “epicentre of the creeping Greater Serbian aggression.”

He said an example of this was the fact that MP Milorad Pupovac had, in 2013, “supported” the ten Serb war crimes suspects, members of wartime paramilitaries and local police who had been arrested in 2013 for crimes committed near Vukovar in 1991.

“What should one say when that same person visited war criminals in jail in 2016 after their verdict became final, and after they were given a combined sentence of 138 years?” Penava asked, adding that “this cannot be a coincidence.”

In October, Penava had organised a protest against the “silence of the institutions,” ostensibly over the failure of Croatian judiciary to process Serb war criminals two decades after the peaceful re-integration of the area.

However, the protest was widely seen as a thinly veiled right-wing attack on Prime Minister Plenkovic and his leadership of the HDZ, in spite of Penava telling the media at every opportunity that it was not. Although the protest eventually went without explicit criticism of Plenkovic, the event was shunned by senior HDZ officials, with speakers invited mentioning the government indirectly, with one of protest’s organisers, Tomislav Josic, cryptically saying that “those who could help Vukovar are not present in the town.”

Pupovac, the leader of ethnic Serbs in the country, is a common target for right-wing groups, not least because him and his two other Serb ethnic minority MPs are in coalition with Plenkovic and the conservative HDZ, and help maintain its thin majority in the 151-seat parliament.

Asked by reporters to comment on Penava’s latest remarks on Monday, Plenkovic avoided addressing the accusations levelled against Pupovac by Penava, and only said that HDZ policy is within the purview of party leadership.

“HDZ polices are based on all the achievements of peaceful reintegration of the Croatian region along the Danube,” Plenkovic said, and added that “those values should be cherished and could help enhance coexistence in that part of Croatia.”

When asked by reporters if he saw Penava’s latest news conference in Vukovar as a blow against him and HDZ leadership, Plenkovic simply said “No.”

Plenkovic went on to say he was happy with HDZ’s 29 percent approval ratings, adding that it is the strongest political party in the country, dealing with numerous challenges in Croatia, and committed to the well-being of the country.

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