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When Croatia joined the European Union in 2013, few could have predicted the geo-economic changes the next decade would bring. From Brexit to Trump to Covid to Ukraine, it's been a white-knuckle ride – but the country's Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic is hoping things will calm down soon.
"The last five years were more than unusual," he told CGTN at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "We passed through Covid. We passed through the consequences of Russia's aggression against Ukraine, which had no time, energy consequences, but economic, financial, social, infertility pressures, security concerns.
"In the big member states, we had an unprecedented situation… you had the vote of no confidence in Paris and a vote of no confidence in Berlin go through. The axis needs to be strengthened.
"And therefore, I think that after the German elections, we will have more stability and that the axis and the engine, which is the Franco-German partnership, takes the economic development into better direction than it was before."
Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic talks exclusively to CGTN at Davos. /CGTN
If economic development is a global issue, the re-election of Donald Trump as U.S. President adds a sprinkle of uncertainty, given Trump's taste for trade tiffs and tariffs. At Davos, China's Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang reaffirmed that there are no winners in a trade war. If Washington is to be uncooperative, Plenkovic is prepared to look elsewhere.
"I think we need to use the mechanisms that are at our disposal," he says. "One is the WTO, which is very important. Second, the European Union has a big variety of free trade agreements with many parts of the world and countries and regional groupings."
Croatia and China
Plenkovic became prime minister in 2016, and two years later he was in China, demonstrating what he sees as an open-minded attitude to global trade among many EU countries.
"The main position of most of the member states is to increase economic cooperation – better access to the markets, work on progress," he says. "These were the main signals of President Xi back in Shanghai when I was there at the big summit for the exports and imports of China."
Plenkovic notes that many of the countries in central and eastern Europe have a particularly close economic relationship with China, partly through the Belt and Road Initiative, and through Chinese investment in infrastructure projects.
"What we saw was increased cooperation in energy from, for instance, the windmill farms, which was very important for us to use the presence of Chinese technology to cater for the energy transition to renewables in Croatia," he says.
"Also, the presence of the Chinese companies in the construction sector. They built the most important bridge that Croatia has built over the past years, a fantastic connection of the Croatian mainland with the southern part of the region."
The Peljesac bridge construction site in Komarna, Croatia. /Ivo Cagalj/Pixsell/Reuters
The southernmost section of Croatia, which includes the key tourist seaport of Dubrovnik, is a semi-exclave geographically separated from the rest of the country – and therefore the EU – by Bosnia-Herzegovina's coastal access to the Adriatic Sea at Neum.
However, the 2018-2021 construction of the Peljesac Bridge by the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) relinked the two parts of the country.
"Now we are physically connected," he says. "It's a beautiful project in terms of architectural design, but also very efficiently performed in terms of construction with technologies that were unavailable for our construction companies."
Nor is that the end of the construction projects, with CRBC now improving Croatia's connections to an even bigger city.
"They're building a tunnel which will link the city of Split, the second biggest city, with the highway that is beyond behind the mountains," he explains, "and thus relieve the excess and the density of the cars that go to the most important tourist destination in Croatia – that is Dalmatia and Split."
Interview by Juliet Mann