Croatia’s ruling party won the recent election on Wednesday by a large margin, but they still need help from far-right groups to keep their power. The election was about a fight between the president and prime minister.
The election was between the ruling conservative party led by the Prime Minister and an alliance of centrist and left-wing parties led by the President and his party.
The electoral commission said that the HDZ won 60 seats out of 151 in the parliament after counting over 90% of the votes. The SDP won 42 seats. The far-right Statehood Movement won 14 seats, which means it will have a lot of power in deciding the next government.
“Tomorrow we will begin to work on creating a new majority in Parliament to form our third government,” Plenkovic said in his speech after winning. “I want to say good job to the other parties that lost to the HDZ. ”
More than half of the people voted, which was a lot more than before, even before the polls were closed.
Croatia, a country in Europe, had an election. They are also part of the European Union and NATO. Croatia is facing problems like high inflation, not enough workers, illegal immigration, and lots of corruption.
The race for Croatia’s 151-seat parliament was important because it would affect the country’s domestic policies and also the unity of the EU as it deals with instability from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
If the HDZ remains in power like we think they will, the country will keep helping Ukraine in its battle against Russia and stay on a pro-Western path. If SDP does well, it could win the European Parliament election in June and the presidential election in December. It could change the HDZ’s control of politics for a long time and might allow for more pro-Russia influence in the country, like in Hungary and Slovakia.
The HDZ has mostly been in charge since Croatia became independent from Yugoslavia in 1991. The Balkan country joined the European Union in 2013, and recently became part of Europe’s passport-free travel area and started using the euro currency.
In Croatia, the president doesn’t have much power and mostly does ceremonial things. The prime minister has most of the political power. The election was like the last part of a long competition between Plenkovic and Milanovic.
After Milanovic set a date for the election and said he wanted to be the prime minister, he started promoting the SDP. Croatia’s highest court judges said it was against the rules when leaders tried to make the change.
The judges said the president can’t try to become prime minister, or take part in elections or support a political party unless he quits his job first.
Milanovic said no and didn’t listen to the highest court. He kept on supporting the left-wing group.
Milanovic said that Plenkovic and the HDZ have been very corrupt and have stolen a lot of money from the government. He is talking about scandals from the past and present, some of which have gone to court.
Plenkovic has been in charge of the government since 2016. He has said many times that Milanovic, if he becomes the prime minister, would move the country further away from the EU and closer to Russia.
Milanovic has spoken in favor of Russia during the war in Ukraine. He doesn’t want Ukrainian soldiers to be trained in Croatia or weapons to be sent to Ukraine because he thinks it will make the war last longer. He also didn’t like the EU’s rules about Ukraine.
Tag: Conservative
-
Croatia’s conservative government wins parliamentary election
-
Conservative lawmakers respond to the prison transfer of Luka Magnotta
The government’s decision to move convicted killer Luka Magnotta to a less secure prison two years ago has sparked complaints from conservative members of parliament. People who support prisoners are saying that the criticism is just about politics.
Magnotta, who is 41 years old, is in prison for the rest of his life because he killed a Chinese student named Jun Lin in Montreal in 2012. The terrible murder became news all around the world because there were videos showing the killer doing terrible things to the dead body and eating it.
On the first day of the week, B.C Conservative MP Frank Caputo made a video on X, previously known as Twitter, about his visit to La Macaza. He wanted to see the living conditions of Paul Bernardo, a famous rapist and killer, who is in a medium-security prison 190 kilometers northwest of Montreal.
While visiting the building, Caputo said that one of the guards mentioned that Luka Magnotta walked right past him.
Caputo’s video, which says, “Canada’s worst killers are living better than most Canadians,” has been watched almost 500,000 times. Some Conservative MPs have also shared their thoughts on it.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a law called Bill C-83 are responsible for Magnotta’s transfer. Bill C-83 was made to change the prison system to make it less strict for inmates.
Conservative House Leader Andrew Scheer criticized the Liberals’ new bail reform bill, which his party thinks lets criminals go free too easily.
Trudeau not only allows dangerous criminals to be released from prison, but when they are kept there, they get special treatment. “It will cost you. ”
A person from the office of Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said that it’s up to Correctional Service Canada to decide how to keep inmates safe.
“Officials at the CSC make decisions about moving prisoners on their own,” said Jean-Sébastien Comeau, a spokesperson for LeBlanc, in an email to CTV News. “The top priority is to make sure that the public and the staff at CSC are safe. ”
In an email to CTV News on Monday, CSC spokesperson Kevin Antonucci said that Canada’s correctional system focuses on helping prisoners change for the better, no matter how long they are in prison.
“This criminal has been in prison for almost ten years,” Antonucci wrote. “They are still in a safe place, and there is no set time for how long they will be there. ”
Our main goal is to make sure that the people are safe, and that is what we are still doing. I want to make it clear that there haven’t been any recent changes in the offender’s situation, despite what the reports say.
CSC didn’t say where Magnotta is now, but it did say he was moved from a high-security prison two years ago.
In January 2022, Magnotta’s lawyers asked a court to move him from a really secure prison in Quebec to a less secure one. They said the prison system had refused their request from last summer.
Cooper wrote on X that this happened because of PMJT’s policies that are not tough on crime. “Canada’s justice system is not working properly after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s 8 years in office. ” A Conservative government with common sense will make sure that violent murderers stay locked up in high-security prisons.
Conservative member of parliament Chris Warkentin said the news is “really surprising. ”
Luka Magnotta and Paul Bernardo might be playing tennis together this summer, and you are paying for it, the writer said.
Last summer, many people paid attention when a well-known murderer was moved from a high-security prison to a less secure one.
The transfer caused a new government rule to be made after it was kept secret. This caused a lot of political arguing, especially involving public safety minister Marco Mendicino, who said he didn’t know about the transfer until the next day.
During an interview with CTV News, Independent Senator Kim Pate, who supports young people and adults in prison, said that the comments made by Conservative MPs online were only about politics.
“Many people don’t realize what goes on in prisons. They think that moving someone from a high-security area to a medium-security area means they are being rewarded or their sentence is getting easier,” she explained. The opposite is actually true. Most people talking about this have never been in those prisons.
In an email to CTV News on Tuesday, University of Ottawa criminology professor and prisoners’ rights advocate Justin Piché said that even though Magnotta did terrible things, society should not treat inmates badly in return.
Piché wrote that it’s too bad the Conservative Party of Canada is talking about Club Fed again. They visited La Macaza and think that inmates having access to amenities and programs makes up for the bad experience of being in prison. “It’s obvious that the opposition party doesn’t care about the suffering caused by being locked up. “ -
David Davis: Thatcher would never have tried to cut benefits amid cost of living crisis
Margaret Thatcher would never have tried to cut benefits amid the cost of living crisis, Conservative former minister David Davis has said.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme today, he said while the Tory leader modelled herself on Ms Thatcher, she should “actually model herself really on Thatcher”.
“Thatcher was strategically terribly bold, but actually tactically incredibly careful. And (Liz Truss) should do the same,” he said.
“All this stuff about, let’s say one of the controversies, cutting benefits. Well, that’s not a real option. Margaret Thatcher would never have tried that, and under these circumstances with the winter coming up that we have.”
Asked what he would say to those in his party who want to change leader, Mr Davis said: “Well, firstly, you haven’t got time for that.
“It takes a year, more than a year, to replace a leader in the Tory Party. Sometimes it takes two or three years.”
Addressing Ms Truss’s start as prime minister, he added: “It would be a very, very unwise person who tried to make a judgment over two years on what’s happened in four weeks.”