In an interview with RTL on Tuesday, President Zoran Milanovic spoke about the procurement of French military aircraft, Croatia's entry to the Schengen area, and the prime minister's conflict with the media, and he also proposed that this year Victory Day be observed in Glina.

The decision to buy French fighter jets cannot expedite Croatia’s entry to the Schengen area of passport-free travel, Milanovic said, adding that Croatia had been ready for entry for a long time, just like Bulgaria and Romania.

“Bulgaria and Romania have been tortured since 2007, at first the delay made sense but for years now it has made no sense,” he said. “If Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, which border Belarus and Ukraine, are ready for accession to Schengen, so is Croatia,” he said.

Milanovic also proposed that this year Victory Day, 5 August, be observed in Glina instead of Knin.

A corps of the army of the so-called Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK) surrendered in Glina, Milanović said, adding that round-number anniversaries could be commemorated in Knin, for example, every five years.

My and Plenkovic’s criticisms are worlds apart

Asked what was the difference between his criticizing state television HRT and the prime minister’s criticism of privately-owned television channels, Milanovic said that those criticisms were “worlds apart.” “When I do it, I do it without any real material powers, when he does it, he does it as a person who can theoretically call your broadcast license into question,” Milanovic said.

It is one thing, Milanovic said, when he criticises “a public service that is financed through a para-tax and whose news desk has been run by a clique and which has been one family’s political business for 20 years, with Plenkovic being at the top.”

“When I criticized acts by commercial televisions as well as some people… I did so by saying ‘Look, those people are no role model in terms of morality because they did certain things in their life, and that’s all I can do,” he said, adding that he could not cause them any harm.

When the prime minister says that a broadcaster hosts a hireling, that is actionable and legal action can be taken by the person to whom that message refers, he said.

Asked if he had gone too far by telling HRT reporters that they were “hirelings of one political camp,” he said that he was not talking about the reporters but about the HRT leadership.

“They work for a political camp and are paid by all citizens, while you do not collect license fee, which is a huge difference,” Milanovic told his host.

“Plenkovic’s high school graduation thesis in 1988 was means of mass communication, which in socialism is called the right to lie, the right to manipulate,” he said, adding that he finds interesting the amount of interest the prime minister shows in that type of social control.

“Independent media can be bad, they can be sub-literate but what matters is that they are not controlled by financial centres from outside Croatia. Anything else is allowed,” he said.