President Zoran Milanovic said on Wednesday that the current regional set-up in Croatia is a more-or-less satisfactory solution and that it would be politically problematic to redesign them into regions.

Everyone is more or less satisfied with the current internal organisation, Milanovic said while addressing a special session held in Viskovo on Wednesday evening, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the establishment of that municipality near Rijeka.

The counties function as transmission or a buffer between the state and people in the local community, the president said.

He added that creating regions as an alternative to the counties would be politically problematic since this state and nation “was founded on the political unity through the history, and regions were always a bone of contention, expression of some other identities and territorial claims on Croatia.”

He said that he could not see anything good in redesigning the internal territorial organisation into single regions such as Dalmatia  in the south or Zagorje in the north, for instance.

They would behave as a state within a state, he said presenting his arguments against such territorial reshape.

The president rnoted that the current internal territorial organisation had been set up in 1993 and that the parliamentary majority had adopted the only possible solution at the time.

Milanovic also said that any attempt to redesign this territorial organisation would fail at the first obstacle.

Commenting on the situation in the municipality of Viskovo, Mayor Sanja Udovic (centre-left SDP party), said that at the time when it was established in 1993, this municipality had 7,000 inhabitants and the population has risen to 16,000. The municipality’s budget is 20 million euros.

Over the last 10 years, Viskovo has tapped €35 million from European Union funds, said Udovic.