Parliamentary opposition parties on Friday welcomed the non-final ruling against former prime minister Ivo Sanader and the governing Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party in the Fimi Media corruption case, saying that the inefficient and slow judiciary was the biggest problem in the country.

Sabina Glasovac of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) said that the ruling showed what they had been warning of all along, that the HDZ is the source of corruption in the entire country.

“We expect an apology from Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic for the plunder of taxpayers’ money, impoverishment of citizens and for undermining the rule of law. We also expect him to remove from his government all the ministers who have shown in the past or present term that nothing has changed in the HDZ except its president,” Glasovac said.

She cited the late judge Ivana Calic, who had handed down a guilty verdict at the initial trial, as saying that Sanader’s actions had undermined the public trust in the state institutions creating a picture of politics as a lucrative occupation in which corruption was more a rule than an exception.

This is the reason why young people are leaving Croatia and why Croatia is at the bottom of European rankings on the rule of law, Glasovac said, adding that Plenkovic is not helping in dealing with the problem, but is only prolonging it by twisting the truth and refusing to face the facts.

“I don’t know of any political party that has been in power for so long to have been found guilty by a court of law and to have worked against and not in the interests of its citizens. This is a precedent, an ugly and dark blotch on Croatian history with which the HDZ marked the entire country,” Glasovac said.

Dalija Oreskovic of the Party with a First and Last Name said that the fact that the trial had gone on for ten years showed the state of the judicial system created by the HDZ.

“I don’t see that this government, or any government before it, has wondered why our judicial system is slow and inefficient. I don’t see any political will to change this situation any time soon,” Oreskovic said.

She said that the political system in Croatia works in the way that the leader of the dominant political party has political power concentrated in his hands and his parliamentary majority obeys him unquestioningly, while Parliament does not do its constitutional task of checking the executive.

Tomislav Tomasevic of the green-left bloc also said that the judicial system was one of the biggest problems in Croatia, especially the duration of trials for corruption and organised crime as various legal tricks were used to drag out proceedings until they became pointless or the statute of limitations expired. He said that he would welcome any acceleration of trials, notably those for corruption and organised crime.