Health Minister, Vili Beros, on Friday survived his third no-confidence vote in Parliament, with 78 MPs voting against sacking the minister in the 151-seat assembly.

Opposition parties regularly call for no-confidence votes against individual government ministers, a practice which has become part of the country’s political folklore. This was the third such vote against Health Minister Vili Beros since he took office in January 2020, about a month before the Covid-19 pandemic began.

This time the vote was initiated by 32 opposition MPs led by the Green-Left Bloc, who cited a variety of problems in the public healthcare system, which they described as “disintegrating.” They said the minister should also be sacked because of the limited access to abortion for many Croatian women, “because of the Medikol and Cuspis cases, lack of reform, debts, and suspicious transplants at the KBC Zagreb hospital,” state agency Hina said, without clarifying.

Before the vote, MP Sandra Bencic (Green-Left Bloc) also accused Beros of the “disastrous results” his handling of the pandemic, the formal taking away of management rights of hospitals from county-level local governments to the government ministry, and the new road safety bill.

MP Pedja Grbin (Social Democratic Party) asked MPs to “vote according to conscience” but added that the parliament majority would clearly not, and that they would eventually boast of having defended Beros. “The fact that you defended the good (party) soldier Beros won’t change the situation in healthcare, it will not make the system any better,” he said.

MP Anka Mrak-Taritas (Glas) said that 900,000 Croatians were currently on waiting lists for various checkups and that Beros had managed to come into conflict “with the whole health system.” MP Zeljko Sacic (Sovereignists) said that “although billions had been spent on Covid vaccines, vaccination did not yield any results.”

MP Kreso Beljak (Croatian Peasant Party) said that “doctors were involved in trading with organs in Zagreb who had also invoked conscientious objection” and that Beros was morally responsible for this. MP Stephen Bartulica (Homeland Movement) said that Beros had failed to defend doctors who were “under horrible pressure” because of conscientious objection, and family doctors who, under the new road safety act, “would have to report their patients to the police.”