MP Nikola Grmoja of the conservative populist Most party said on Sunday they had collected the minimum number signatures for their petition seeking a nationwide referendum on Covid pass mandates and the transfer of Covid decision-making to the national legislature.

The two-week legally prescribed deadline to collect signatures from interested voters had expired at midnight on 18 December. For a referendum campaign to be successful, Croatian law requires for it to collect signatures from 10 percent of all registered voters, or 368,446 signatures.

Grmoja, however, stopped short of specifying the number of collected signatures, and in his statement to state agency Hina on Sunday evening, he said that they were still gathering data and information from the ground and from local teams that had collected  signatures in the last 14 days. The results of the campaign are expected to be known on Wednesday.

If the petition is found to have met the minimum threshold for the number of singatures, the questions proposed for the referendum could be tested by the Constitutional Court.

Last Thursday, MPs from the Green-Left Bloc, Centre/Glas, Peasant Party /Workers’ Front and Istrian Democratic Party groups strongly denied the statement by the Most’s Vice President Grmoja that he had received guarantees from all opposition parties that they would support Bridge’s referendum petition.

“That statement is a complete lie,” says a joint statement signed by the leaders of the four opposition groups, stressing that these parties “neither participated in the meeting on the referendum initiative nor pledged their support in any way.”

Hina did not say how many MPs do these parties control in the national 151-seat parliament.

“It is unclear why MP Grmoja told such lies. … Some members of our groups have warned Most MPs several times that the referendum initiative would further divide citizens, mobilise anti-vax sentiment, help spread fake news and conspiracy theories and potentially contribute to the escalation of violence among citizens,” the joint statement said.

“The statement was released the day after in the national parliament Bridge deputies entered into a conflict with opposition lawmakers from the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and other centre-left groups on the topic of vaccination against coronavirus,” Hina said, without clarifying.