Josipovic Calls on Croatians to Support EU Bid

"Croatia will not stop being sovereign. By entering the European Union our sovereignty will receive a better, bigger and more important dimension than it has today," the president stressed at a conference on EU accession on Friday.

"The EU will not govern Croatia. The EU is a community founded on an entirely different concept, not the concept of governing, but the concept of managing, and Croatia will be one of the 28 countries which will manage the EU," he added.

Croatians will head to the polls on Sunday to vote on their country's EU accession bid. After signing its accession treaty in December last year, Zagreb hopes the country will join the European bloc in July 2013 but it needs a show of popular support to advance the bid.   
Stressing that by entering the bloc, Croatia will be able to participate in the decision-making process, instead of waiting for others to make decisions, Josipovic said this was an important achievement. He added that Croatian citizens would have an opportunity to compete in all sectors - the economy, science and culture.

Asked what would happen if the Croatians rejected the country's EU entry at Sunday's referendum, Josipovic said he was not considering this possibility.

The head of the delegation of the European Union to Croatia, Ambassador Paul Vandoren, told conference participants that the decision on Croatia's EU entry was possibly the most important decision Croatia would have to make for its future.

Vandoren said the final decision was up to Croatian citizens and that the EU would respect it no matter what it was.

The latest opinion polls, released on Friday, show that 61 per cent of Croatians plan to vote in favour of membership, 28 per cent intend to vote against, while 11 per cent are undecided.

While both the government and the opposition have spent the past several weeks urging Croatians to support European Union membership, anti-EU activists have made their own efforts to convince voters.

Several hundred people gathered in Zagreb on January 14 to protest against Croatia's membership, and criticised the Croatian authorities for their pro-European policy, which they described as "treacherous" and "subservient to the European power-mongering centres".

Addressing the rally last Saturday, the leader of the Croatian Pure Party of Rights, Josip Miljak, said the European association was falling apart at the seams. He called on Croatians to vote against the country's membership in the EU, which he described as outdated.