At a cabinet meeting on Thursday October 10th 2019, Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic presented a new calendar of public holidays and memorial days for Croatia.
Plenkovic said he is convinced that that the amendments would be more appropriate and would remove any doubts, confusion and vagueness.
Statehood Day would revert to May 30th and not June 25th as is the case now. May 30th is the day that the first multi-party democratic parliament was convened in 1990, and was the date for Statehood Day until 2001.
Explaining the change, Plenkovic said “That day is a sort of start of the adoption of a series of key acts that led us to independence, sovereignty and, finally, international recognition. It is 30 May in fact that is a sort of day of democracy, we can freely call that, the most referential and most relevant, and at the same time it was accepted very well among the Croatian people.
“The idea is that in 2020, on the 30th anniversary of that first 30 May, we put things in the right place. We believe that 30 May as Statehood Day will make Croatian citizens respect the state.”
The second change is that November 18th will become the Remembrance Day for Homeland War Victims and Remembrance Day for the Victims of Vukovar and Skabrnja.
To balance out the holidays, Independence Day on October 8th would change to a memorial day called Croatian Parliament Day, June 25th would become a new memorial day called Independence Day.
| Date | Current | Proposal |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 1 | New Year’s Day | New Year’s Day |
| Jan 6 | Three Kings | Three Kings |
| Apr 13 | Easter Monday | Easter Monday |
| May 1 | Labour Day | Labour Day |
| May 30 | Statehood Day | |
| Jun 11 | Corpus Christi | Corpus Christi |
| Jun 22 | Anti-Fascist Struggle Day | Anti-Fascist Struggle Day |
| Jun 25 | Statehood Day | |
| Aug 5 | Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving | Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving |
| Aug 15 | Assumption of Mary | Assumption of Mary |
| Oct 8 | Independence Day | |
| Nov 1 | All Saints’ Day | All Saints’ Day |
| Nov 18 | Remembrance Day | |
| Dec 25 | Christmas Day | Christmas Day |
| Dec 26 | St. Stephen’s Day | St. Stephen’s Day |
Plenkovic highlighted that the number of public holidays would remain at 13 which, he said, is important from the economic aspect, because of the impact on the economy, GDP growth and everything that entails.
“We consider this distribution of public holidays and memorial days to regulate better and more precisely what occurred to us and the way that should stay in the future,” Plenkovic added.
| Date | Memorial Day |
|---|---|
| Jan 15 | Day of International Recognition |
| May 9 | Europe Day and Victory over Fascism Day |
| Jun 25 | Independence Day |
| Oct 8 | Croatian Parliament Day |
| Aug 23 | European Day of Remembrance for the Victims of all Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes |
