Croatia is certain to join the European Union on July 1 next year if it continues to make progress as laid out in the European Commission's monitoring report, President Ivo Josipovic said in an interview with Jutarnji List daily of Monday.
Josipovic was commenting on warnings made by senior German officials who questioned Croatia's EU entry because of its outstanding commitments.
"Germany has strongly supported us since the very beginning of our journey towards the EU. I understand these statements as general scepticism towards enlargement after Croatia's accession on the one hand and an encouragement to us to do what we need to do on the other," the Croatian president said.
He said that the monitoring report was very favourable to Croatia.
"The remaining reforms that are identified in ten points in the report as those Croatia is expected to carry out, are no surprise and Croatia has been working on them all along," Josipovic said.
The Speaker of the Bundestag, Norbert Lammert, has called for a halt to the EU enlargement process, including the planned accession of Croatia. "Because of our experience with Bulgaria and Romania, we must take the European Commission's latest progress report seriously. Croatia obviously is not yet ready for entry," Lammert, a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), said in an interview with Die Welt am Sonntag newspaper.
Before Lammert, another prominent Christian Democrat also spoke against Croatia's accession to the EU. "At the moment Croatia is not ready for EU entry," the chairman of the Bundestag European Affairs Committee, Gunther Krichbaum, told Saarbrueckener Zeitung daily on Friday.
