We speak to one of the most seasoned players on the European stage, Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic. During his eight years in office, he has experienced the latter stages of the 2015-16 migrant crisis, the Covid pandemic, and the impact of the war in Ukraine, as well as overseeing his country’s entry into the eurozone and the Schengen free-travel area. We discuss topical issues in the EU as well as in his region, particularly EU enlargement towards the Western Balkans.
We ask Plenkovic if there is a fresh impetus for enlargement, in the light of EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen‘s tour of the Western Balkans, during which she touted a €6 billion growth plan to bring the region’s economies and markets closer to the EU.
“I think there is a new political momentum,” the Croatian premier replies. “The biggest promoter of enlargement policies is [Vladimir] Putin. Had he not invaded Ukraine, I don’t think we would have seen the transfer of the neighbouring and partnership countries such as Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia into a pool, which is called the enlargement process. Now we have many more countries who have the vocation to join and have applied for membership. So I think there is an acceleration.”
We suggest that things are more complicated than that, as public opinion is not solidly behind the EU in all those countries, as the razor-thin “Yes” to EU membership in the referendum in Moldova just demonstrated.
“We have seen the influence of external forces in the debate, in hybrid warfare, in disinformation, and this often leads either to a fragmentation of the political spectrum or to a very clear polarisation. We have seen that in Moldova,” Plenkovic answers. “So I think this requires even more pedagogy by political leaders. They need to be more aggressive and more clear, because it’s not easy to explain to society what the benefits [of EU integration] are. Especially in the countries that were more connected with Russia.”
We ask about Serbia, which is a candidate to join the EU, and about the Serbian leadership’s manoeuvring between the EU, Russia and China. “Unlike a majority of the other countries in our region, Serbia’s level of alignment with the EU in terms of foreign and defence policy is between 50 percent and 60 percent,” Plenkovic responds. “This means that they are playing this multi-vector approach: a little bit with Brussels, a little bit with Berlin, a little bit with Paris, a little bit with Moscow, a little bit with Beijing. If Serbia really, genuinely, wants to join the European Union, they will have to make up their minds, despite their historical ties with Russia.”
We also discuss migration – a major preoccupation at the last Brussels summit of EU leaders. Asked about the controversial Italy-Albania accord aimed at sending asylum seekers in Italy to Albania, Plenkovic states: “We are reserved for the moment about this new initiative that Italy and Albania made. So far, as we understand, there are some legal issues that are difficult. So we need to see in practice how this pilot project will function. What we (in Croatia) advocate is full alignment of visa policies, because we have seen an unacceptable practice of people flying into Belgrade or to Sarajevo as tourists, without a visa requirement, and then they end up as illegal migrants trying to cross the so-called green border, for instance, to Croatia. Forty percent of the illegal migrants which are stopped by our police on our borders actually came to our region and want to enter Schengen and the EU through our border, by illegally crossing it in such a manner.”
Programme prepared by Perrine Desplats, Isabelle Romero, Oihana Almandoz and Elitsa Gadeva
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