Leader of the left-wing parliamentary party, Workers Front (RF), Katarina Peovic, said on Friday that she had proposed a set of measures asking that vouchers used to pay for energy bills should be raised from 200 to 400 kuna (€26-53) per household, and that eligibility for the scheme should be based on personal income levels, so that ten times more Croatians would be covered by the scheme.

Appearing in N1 television’s daily program, Peovic said that the proposal should be discussed by the parliament urgently, as they were related to current energy price hikes. She added that her party – whose only MP is Peovic herself, in the 151-seat legislature – viewed these ideas as “very important class measures.”

“We believe inflation is a class issue because the rising prices will not affect everyone in the same way, which is why the burden of the crisis should be distributed fairly,” she said.

Energy vouchers are currently only available to people with minimum allowances and persons with disabilities registered with social welfare centres, provided that their incomes are not higher than 800 kuna (€106) per month. These are currently used by about 60,000 Croatians.

Meanwhile, Peovic argued, there are more than 600,000 pensioners in the country whose income is “below the poverty threshold,” so she proposed that the new threshold should be set at 60 percent of the average salary, amounting to 5,710 kuna (€760) for a family of four and around 2,700 (€360) for single-member households.

“We believe that everyone with income below that amount… should be entitled to energy vouchers, which should be increased from the current amount of 200 kuna to 400 kuna. Also, in addition to electricity vouchers, one should also introduce vouchers for heating and for natural gas, which we believe should also be taxed at a lower VAT rate of 13 percent, just like electricity already is,” she told N1.

Peovic said that state run utility companies such as the HEP power board, should also pitch in by “giving up a part of their profits,” to help subsidizing energy bills for households. In 2021 the state-owned HEP posted a 1.4 billion kuna (€186 million) profit.

(€1 = 7.52 kuna)