Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Davor Bozinovic said on Tuesday that the ruling coalition, which includes Zagreb Mayor Milan Bandic's Labour and Solidarity Party, would "carry on" until the parliamentary election which, he believes, will be held in the autumn.

The fact that the HDZ branch in Zagreb earlier in the day voted against Bandic’s draft urban development plan for Zagreb does not mean the end of cooperation between the HDZ and the Labour and Solidarity Party at the state level, Bozinovic confirmed in an interview with RTL television.

“The coalition will carry on until the parliamentary election,” he said.

He added that there was no need for parliamentary elections to be held before September, but that the HDZ was always ready for them.

Bozinovic, who is the spokesperson for the team of HDZ leader and Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic in intraparty elections, also commented on the current barb trading with the rival team, led by Miro Kovac, who, like Plenkovic, is running for party president.

He dismissed the remark by Vukovar Mayor Ivan Penava, who is a member of Kovac’s team and is running for HDZ vice-president, that the current party leadership was using its position to influence party members and that, among other things, their team had problems with collecting signatures of support for their candidacies.

“Everyone who announced their candidacies yesterday were given forms and they can freely collect party members’ signatures for their candidacies. And not just that – the rules are so democratic that… one can support more than one candidacy,” said Bozinovic, adding that more than 200,000 party members had the right to vote in the intraparty elections.

Commenting on the fact that current HDZ deputy president Milijan Brkic, who supports Kovac’s team, has dismissed Plenkovic’s claim that Brkic was the first to advocate the current coalition with the Croatian People’s Party (HNS), Bozinovic said that “there has been a lot of collective amnesia lately.”

“There’s more of that,” he said, confirming that he was referring to Kovac and his current negative stance on the ratification of the Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (Istanbul Convention) and recalling that at the time when the HDZ was in the opposition, Kovac attacked the then SDP-led government for not ratifying the convention.

Bozinovic did not agree with the interviewer’s remark that a rift had occurred in the HDZ in the context of intraparty elections.

“There are different views, and all that matters is how credible one is. Plenkovic’s team was definitely not the first one to attack. Everything that was said was a reaction to unfounded accusations,” he said, expressing hope that members of Plenkovic’s team would win the intraparty elections.

Bozinovic was also asked to comment on the case of Josip Celic, a deputy national police director who was suspended from duty after he was caught on camera speeding in a built-up area, but was later acquitted of the charges by Zadar Misdemeanour Court.

After the interviewer pressed him to say if he had known that Celic was on an undercover assignment at the time, Bozinovic said: “I don’t know what I’m not supposed to know.”

“We will wait for the investigation to be completed,” he added.