PM comments on four years of Croatia's EU membership

The Peljesac Bridge project will probably be the most concrete, most visible and biggest individual project Croatia will complete by 2020, when it will be able to say what it has done well and where improvement is needed, Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said in Dubrovnik on Saturday, on the fourth anniversary of Croatia's accession to the EU.

"I believe that in the past four years we have made progress in terms of adopting policies to make the most of the benefits of membership but for all our citizens to be able to more specifically assess our EU membership, I believe we will have to wait for the end of the full seven-year budget perspective in 2020," Plenkovic told reporters on the margins of the 12th Dubrovnik Forum.

He said that it was the government's ongoing task to increase the absorption of EU funds.

"The Peljesac Bridge project will probably be the most concrete, most visible and biggest individual project" to be accomplished in that period, he said.

Asked about a recent arbitration ruling on the Croatian-Slovenian border dispute, which Croatia does not recognise, Plenkovic said that the European Commission was very careful in its comments on the matter and that comments by most countries were balanced.

The situation needs to be "de-dramatised", he said, stressing that he expected much more of meetings with his Slovenian counterpart Miro Cerar.

He recalled that the decision to have the dispute resolved through arbitration was made when Croatia's EU entry talks were deadlocked and when during the six months of the Czech presidency no policy area had been opened or closed.

Croatia has arranged the settlement of border disputes with neighbouring countries in different ways - with Slovenia it opted for arbitration, with Bosnia and Herzegovina for an agreement and with Serbia for a bilateral commission, while the border with Hungary had already been defined, he said.

Responding to a reporter's remark that talks would be difficult given that the two countries had entirely opposed views, Plenkovic said the most important thing was to hold talks.

"The important thing is that there are no unilateral moves," he said.

Text: Hina

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