The parliamentary Opposition on Thursday agreed to launch a motion to collect signatures for the replacement of Construction Minister Darko Horvat over the slow pace of reconstruction following the 2020 earthquakes in Zagreb and Petrinja and failure to use funding from the EU's Solidarity Fund.

The motion was launched by GLAS party leader and MP Anka Mrak-Taritas, who said she believed it would take a day or two to collect the necessary number of signatures to put forward a motion to replace Horvat, who, she said, was not doing his job.

“It took him seven months to prepare the law, plus one year to realise why the law was not good and that it had to be changed. Reconstruction work has not been launched on any family home or apartment building and the minister has proven to be incapable of using the five billion euros from the Fund that has been sitting idle in our account for reconstruction and emergency interventions for public buildings for a year, plus an additional two and a half billion for buildings in the area of Banija,” the MP said, explaining why the Opposition insisted on replacing the minister.

If PM Andrej Plenkovic is looking for who is to blame for the slow post-earthquake reconstruction, he should look for culprits in his own government, with Horvat being one of the main culprits, Mrak-Taritas said, adding that she was looking forward to hearing which arguments Plenkovic would use to defend his minister.

MP Sandra Bencic of the Green-Left Bloc said that the opposition motion made a lot of sense to discuss the consequences of “Minister Horvat’s inaction and the inaction of all officials in charge of reconstruction” and to ask all the questions citizens had been asking themselves on a daily basis, so that the minister and others answer them.

MP Stipo Mlinaric of the right-wing DP party said the topic of post-earthquake reconstruction had nothing to do with ideology but with Horvat’s incompetence.