Social Democratic Party (SDP) parliamentarian, Zeljko Jovanovic, said in Rijeka on Saturday that corruption was a burning issue of the Croatian society and criticised the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) of being incapable to address that problem.

“We in the SDP claim that the HDZ is not capable of fighting corruption and therefore we have prepared our anti-corruption agenda and we call on all to join us in the fight against the present-day HDZ which is irreversibly pushing Croatia into the quagmire of corruption by its corruption scandals,” Jovanovic said at a news conference.

He underscored that the first measure would be to push the HDZ as far away as possible from the power.

Jovanovic said that it was in vain for the HDZ leader and Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic to claim that he will not allow anybody to label the HDZ as a corrupt party as long as one of the main partners of the HDZ is Zagreb Mayor Milan Bandic, indicted for graft, and after “a half of his cabinet ministers had to step down on suspicion of conflict of interest.”

Jovanovic accused the current health minister Milan Kujundzic of causing chaos in the healthcare system, and also of having attempted to enrol his own son into the medical school in Rijeka by submitting false documents.

Jovanovic held the news conference to reiterate his criticism of the HDZ for Croatia being placed on the “devastating 63rd place” out of 180 places of the ranking based on the Corruption Perceptions Index which Transparency International uses to measure the perception of corruption in 180 countries and territories.

Those countries and territories are ranked by their perceived levels of public sector corruption, according to experts and business people. Croatia scored 47 points on a scale from 100 (very clean) to 0 (highly corrupt), ranking 63rd. The 2019 ranking shows that Croatia has one pointless and ranks three places below its 2018 ranking.