Homeland Movement MP Karolina Vidovic Kristo said on Thursday that the statement by Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, that he would order the police and secret service to identify those inciting hatred, was dangerous, adding that such actions had been taken during the communist regime.
“If we lived in a functioning and vital democracy, his press conference would cause a scandal because Plenkovic said that he would order the police and the secret service SOA to identify hatemongers,” Vidovic Kristo said in Parliament.
“The secret service did that kind of work during the communist regime,” she added.
Vidovic Kristo said that Plenkovic had insulted her without giving any concrete facts. Since Plenkovic had also spoken of European values, she drew a parallel with the European Union, saying that it was governed by the rule of law and that there were no untouchables there.
Plenkovic said on Wednesday that he “can’t point the finger at anyone” at the moment but that society must ask who incited hatred in Croatia’s political life, “who even after this act (Monday’s shooting in St. Mark’s Square), like (Homeland Movement MPs) Ivan Penava and Mrs Karolina Vidovic Kristo, can make statements which should be roundly condemned.”
He called their statements “unacceptable, unbelievable in the political sense, certainly not conducive to a culture of tolerance and normal behaviour in the functioning society of a European Union member state.”
Speaking after a 22-year-old man shot dead a police officer guarding the government building in St Mark’s Square on Monday, Vidovic Kristo said that “not even putting tanks around St Mark’s Square will save the government from public discontent.”
Another Homeland Movement deputy, Vukovar mayor Ivan Penava, said that the shooter “is not like his peers, who have escaped to Germany, but has shown a revolt.”
During today’s press conference, Vidovic Kristo said that, as a citizen and a mother, she was deeply shaken by Danijel Bezuk’s desperate and irrational act which could not be justified.
Homeland Movement leader Miroslav Skoro said on Thursday that Prime Minister Plenkovic was behaving like a two-year-old child. “The way he is behaving in this situation resembles a two-year-old child who covers their eyes with their hands, shuts themselves in their room and points the finger at others saying that they are the culprits for the situation for which Andrej Plenkovic and his trading coalition are obviously responsible.”