The Most party on Monday "expressed dissatisfaction" with the Constitutional Court's ruling that the questions presented to voters in its two referendum petitions from last year, which called for abolishing mandatory Covid passes and for transferring the powers of the national Covid task force to Parliament, were not in line with Croatia's Constitution, state agency Hina reported.

“This isn’t just the constitutional court’s defeat but also the defeat of the ruling HDZ party because it does not wish to hear the opinion of its citizens collected in the middle of summer regarding its management of the pandemic,” Hina cited Most as saying in an unsigned post on the party’s Facebook profile.

“The court’s failure to adhere to legally prescribed time-frames to test the constitutionality of the two questions proved that it was under huge pressure from the ruling government to foil Most’s initiative,” the post said.

“First they broke the deadline and then they quashed a constitutional question which is constitutionally unquestionable,” the party said on Facebook, and added that this did not just amount to “stamping on Most” but also “on the will of 400,000 citizens who opted for calling a referendum on the Covid task force and the way the epidemic was being handled.”

“It has been confirmed that institutions are completely occupied by the ruling clique and that the constitutional court is the puppet of HDZ which created it, and now today it has to adopt senseless constitutional decisions to satisfy political orders,” Most added in the unsigned post.

Most underscored that it had “tried to do everything within the institutional framework,” but now “it has been shown that it is completely controlled and the only thing left to do is ousting HDZ from power.”

The conservative populist opposition party Most controls 8 MPs in the 151-seat Parliament.  They called for referendums to be held so that Croatians can vote on whether they agree with Covid passes in public, and also to give MPs powers to decide on any Covid-related restrictions via a vote.

The party, whose name translates as “Bridge” in Croatian, is largely made up of local-level conservative politicians. They had formed uneasy coalition governments with HDZ twice in the past. The first time was in 2016 when the HDZ-Most government self-destructed when HDZ led by former intelligence services chief Tomislav Karamarko could not overcome disagreements over political appointments, triggering snap elections.

The second time was in 2017, when their continuing disagreements culminated in the current PM and HDZ leader, Andrej Plenkovic, kicking out three cabinet ministers from Most, effectively sending the party back into opposition. In the last election, in July 2020, Most won 7.4 percent of the vote, their worst result ever – but still enough to get 8 MPs in the national Parliament.

Some of their prominent members – who also hold local government offices – had openly defied nationally introduced mask mandates and restrictions imposed due to the Covid pandemic.