How can you be both a good student economically and have lost 10% of your population in ten years, because of a vast brain drain? Sunday 1er January 2023, Croatia joins the euro zone, becoming its twentieth member country, and the Schengen area, its twenty-seventh member, in a paradoxical situation.
At first glance, this is an undeniable political and economic success for a state that was still at war three decades ago. A conflict which, from 1990 to 1995, caused 20,000 deaths, for a total cost over five years representing 160% of the gross domestic product (GDP). “This is a successful rise to rocket speed, only ten years after becoming a member of the European Union [UE], to congratulates Ognian Zlatev, the EU representative in Zagreb. Croatia can be proud. »
Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic talks about “the realization of a dream”. “That was our goal from the start., adds Boris Vujcic, the governor of the central bank, who was, in the 1990s, a European civil servant, then was part of the negotiating team allowing his country to join the EU, in the 2000s. There was no doubt for us: we are a European nation. »
On paper, the statistics are fragile, but positive: after six years of catastrophic recession, between 2009 and 2015, national growth has exceeded 20% since 2016, unemployment has fallen to 7.2%, its lowest level in three decades, and GDP per capita is now 70% of the EU average, placing it between Greece and Portugal.
Far from the golds of the official palaces and the tables of economic statistics, the group of a dozen retirees seated in a small café in Donji Lapac sees things differently. This village, located in the mountains in the south of the country, near the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, remains terribly scarred by Operation “Storm” in 1995, when the last strongholds of Serbian resistance were driven out.
“The fourth currency of our life”
In the streets, there are still burnt houses, which have remained as they have been for three decades. Others were rebuilt in a hurry by the State, recognizable by their exposed breeze blocks, without the facade ever being completed. These pensioners, mostly Serbs who fled at the time and returned after several years of exile, now live far from their children. For lack of decent wages, the latter left to look for work abroad and settled in Norway, Australia, the United Kingdom, Iceland or Switzerland. In Donji Lapac, the population increased from 2,100 to 1,300 inhabitants between 2011 and 2021.
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