Croatia's president pledges to help economic recovery
February 15, 2015
Croatia's new president is set to serve a five-year term after a narrow victory over her left-wing predecessor Ivo Josipovic in January. Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, a 46-year-old former diplomat from the conservative HDZ party, took her oath before a crowd of thousands of supporters in Zagreb, pledging to work on Croatia becoming "a rich state."
"Our economy has been hit by crisis for the last six years," she told the gathered crowd. "Thousands of young people are leaving, many companies are going bankrupt. This requires urgent action from the government, employers, unions."
Croatia is burdened by a deep recession, despite the country entering the EU in summer of 2013. Unemployment in this Adriatic nation of 4.4 million remains at almost 20 percent, with barely any economic growth expected this year.
"We need a wide national consensus about the key issues, there is no time for divisions… We must stop living off the money we're borrowing from future generations," Grabar-Kitarovic said.
Although the presidential post is mostly ceremonial, Grabar-Kitarovic's victory could make it easier for her HDZ party to win power in the parliamentary election later this year.
Diplomatic background
The new president also said that all Croatian neighbors should join the EU for the sake of lasting peace in southeastern Europe.
"Our permanent strategic national interest remains to include all of southeast Europe in European and euro-Atlantic integration, because every other option prolongs uncertainty and can ultimately lead to the renewal of lines of division and separation," she said.
Grabar-Kitarovic also stressed the importance of settling border disputes with neighboring countries and clearing up the fate of missing persons with Serbia, Croatia's main foe in the independence war in the 1990s.
Even decades after the end of the war, relations between Zagreb and Belgrade remain somewhat tense.
Grabar-Kitarovic is the fourth Croatian president since the country gained independence from the former Yugoslavia, and the first women in the country's history to fill this position. She previously served as a foreign minister and ambassador to Washington, and she has also worked in NATO.
dj/cmk (Beta, Reuters, AP, AFP)