A new law on constituencies will be adopted in September and minimum interventions will be made to the current one, under which there are ten constituencies with 14 MPs elected in each, Jutarnji List daily said on Saturday.

At their last meeting, Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic told the ruling coalition partners that the new law would be adopted by September “with minimum damage and with minimum interventions,” according to the daily.

Plenkovic told them his HDZ party would not allow running in an election that someone might declare unconstitutional, that he respected Constitutional Court decisions, and that in the next election, each vote would have equal value, regardless of the constituency.

The most important message to the coalition partners was that there definitely would be no early parliamentary election.

At the end of last year, Constitutional Court president Miroslav Separovic said the next parliamentary election, if held under the current law, would be unconstitutional.

Already in 2010, the Court called on parliament to amend the law because the differences in the number of voters in some constituencies were over 5% in relation to the average.

However, nothing has been done and in the last election, in 2020, the differences were so high that for the first time, the question was raised of whether the government could have been formed had each vote had equal value.

The population decrease and in particular the big emigration from some regions, such as Slavonia, have additionally reduced the number of voters in some constituencies so that in some an MP needs far fewer votes to be elected than in others.

The Constitutional Court has again opened a debate on the constitutionality of the law on constituencies and is expected to deliver a decision soon.

At the coalition meeting, Plenkovic did not say what would be changed in the law, only that there were several options that he would present to the partners, Jutarnji List said, adding that HDZ sources say the ruling party has still not opened talks on the constituencies and that it is not known which solution will be chosen.