The People Decide initiative has enough signatures to petition for referendum

A group that is pushing to change Croatia's electoral system announced late Tuesday that they had collected enough signatures in their petition drive to hold a referendum on the issue.

According to sources, the People Decide initiative, has more than 450 thousand signatures, well above the 375 thousand they need by law to trigger a national vote. The group said it would release a final figure on Thursday.

The group has proposed two referendum questions that would introduce at least six changes to the way Croatian voters choose their representatives in parliament, including reducing the number of representatives in the Sabor from 150 to 120 and increasing preferential voting on party lists. Furthermore, the group wants to reduce the number of seats reserved for ethnic minority MPs to six and restrict them from voting on forming a government and the national budget.

Calling for a step-by-step approach, Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said today that step one would be to determine if the group had collected enough valid signatures. Step two would be to see if the questions hold up under the Constitution. "What is important is for us to see if these questions are constitutional. I've said several times that Croatia has a certain aquis, and this aquis includes the protection of national minorities," Plenković said.

Serb minority MP Milorad Pupovac, asked about whether he would insist on a Constitutional Court review of the referendum questions, said his goal was to protect democratic values. "I want to help open the eyes of all the people in this country who truly care about protecting our democracy from those who want to destroy democratic institutions by claiming it is their democratic right."

SDP MP Peđa Grbin believes the group's goal is to strip minorities of their rights. “This question, which refers to national minorities, strikes at the very heart of Croatia's constitutional order," Grbin said.

Luka Mlinarić, a representative of the People Decide initiative, denies the group is targeting ethnic minorities. He says minority MPs stick by whoever is in power and prevent any real change from happening in the political system. "The position of national minority MPs in parliament cannot be such that they consistently are the ones propping up the government's majority and holding up their hands when needed,” according to Mlinarić.

If passed, the changes would cause a major disruption in the way the country's two most powerful parties, the ruling HDZ and the opposition SDP, have functioned for decades, which makes it more likely that the referendum will go to the Constitutional Court for review. This point has not been lost on the activists, who say the Constitutional Court will be under enormous political pressure to strike down the referendum.