The opposition populist Most party is launching a signature gathering campaign on December 4 for two referendum initiatives aimed at ensuring that COVID-19-related measures are decided by a two-thirds majority in Parliament and not by the national COVID-19 response team.

“Our aim is to bring down the rule of the national response team and that’s why we are initiating these referendum questions,” party leader Bozo Petrov said at a press conference on Thursday, adding that decision-making on the pandemic should be brought back within the democratic framework.

Independent MP Marija Selak-Raspudic, who is a member of the Most parliamentary group, said that the first referendum initiative would ask citizens to say whether it should be specified in the Constitution that the Croatian Parliament should make decisions regarding the pandemic by a two-thirds majority.

The second initiative has three objectives.

The first one is that restrictions on the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution cannot be decided by the civil protection response team but by Parliament. The second objective is that all the decisions made by the national response team which are still in force should be approved by Parliament, while the third objective is that the decision on COVID certificates, which is currently in force, should be abolished within a period of 30 days and that all further epidemiological measures should be decided by Parliament by a two-thirds majority.

“All decisions made so far have almost completely excluded Parliament as the highest representative and legislative body in Croatia, especially in restricting the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. These decisions were not put to consultation with the interested public or to public or parliamentary discussion, and were mostly adopted arbitrarily, disproportionately restricting constitutional rights and freedoms,” Selak-Raspudic said.

MP Marin Miletic said that the party had so far brought together 6,270 volunteers who would be gathering signatures across the country, and that 49,780 citizens had contacted the party saying they wanted to participate in the signature gathering campaign.