“Prosecuting former prime minister Ivo Sanader signaled that Croatia was willing to check all the boxes to get into the European Union but one can’t be confident that the political culture has changed or that the institutions are completely and fully dealing with corruption”, said Jelena Berkovic, of GONG, a nongovernmental organization that focuses on democracy and human rights, for the New York Times.
«Since Romania and Bulgaria joined the Union in 2007, worries have grown that those two nations, the bloc’s poorest, entered prematurely. Both have continued to struggle with unstable governments and corruption, even as they have tried to absorb $35 billion in regional development aid allocated by the Union since 2007.
European officials praised Croatia’s entry as a symbol of the continuing allure of the bloc, despite its economic crisis, but some fear that Croatia will be another weak fringe as the euro crisis forces governments to trim budgets, and sow instability among more established members, which have problems with corruption of their own», writes Stephen Castle of the NYT and you can read the whole article HERE.