"He stole, but he also gave to us"

(index.hr)

If you're wondering why our politicians are the way they are and why the politics of this country are going the way they are, have you ever thought that it's all about the citizens who elect them?

We read that the mayor of Nova Gradiška, Vinko Grgić, has been arrested. For the second time. We will remember, the internet remembers well, that Grgić was targeted by the European Public Prosecutor's Office five years ago, along with Krešo Petek, the owner of Elektrocentar Petek, and a few others.

Grgić was then the mayor and an SDP member of parliament. His immunity was lifted, he was arrested, and he was expelled from the SDP. He finished his parliamentary term as an independent. The proceedings, which have been dragging on for five years, are still not over - there is no final verdict.

The event did not harm Grgić at the local level. New elections and he is still the mayor. He has been in that position since 2016, now as an independent. And then, this time it is not EPPO but our USKOK, Grgić is arrested again.

Arrest team

In Zagreb, people get up at four in the morning whose job it is to knock on doors while others are still dreaming. They take a white shirt and a Varteks jacket purchased through public procurement from a chair. They check where the official badge and travel order for Nova Gradiška are. They kiss the forehead of their sleeping better half and say: "It's nothing dangerous, politician, I'll be back for dinner."

An hour later, a pair of older Audis with cheap tires, cars too old for ministers, with tires provided by the lowest bidder, glide along the bypass and onto the A3 towards Slavonia. The sun appears only as a gray spot behind the clouds, and there, behind the toll booths of Nova Gradiška, an escort waits. A police car, a Škoda Octavia, with markings and uniformed officers.

The arrest team. They stop in front of a beautifully decorated house, with a shiny fence and neatly trimmed hedges. It's still early in the morning, but not too early, the state doesn't like paying for night shifts. The one in the Varteks jacket comes to the door. The bell. Silence. Another bell, more insistent. Finally, on the doorstep is a man in slippers and a bathrobe, the mayor. A moment between dream and reality.

Twice in five years, the same scene has been repeated, the same drama, only the police inspector's jacket has become a little narrower, because the years go by, and there are no more Varteks vouchers. When the same image returns twice, when a repeatedly elected mayor is arrested twice by two investigative bodies, only one question arises: What's wrong with you all?

Vinko Grgić is legally innocent - but where is the political responsibility?

Of course, you can say, and you will be right - Vinko Grgić is innocent. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty by a final verdict. But the vast majority of you reading this will never receive a criminal indictment in your life. Some will receive one for consuming marijuana or altering the license plate on Tomo Vinković's grandmother's tractor. But without inspectors getting up at four in the morning, without the line, without the entire police protocol.

If a whole police column picked you up every few years - at least there would be some talk about you in the village. You would be at least a little suspicious. Unless you were the mayor. Then all that is possible.

Let's not lie to ourselves, Europe can send the EPPO, Croatia can send USKOK, but it cannot enter the ballot box. That's where you enter. At the ballot box, you express your will, and your will, dear citizens, was precisely the one that made Vinko Grgić a member of parliament, which also made him mayor several times.

What matters is that he gave it to us too.

In a short, casual journalistic report, one with a few statements from the street, without much analysis, without political scientists and sociologists at the table of a national television show, we learn more than from five parliamentary debates and three books on political sociology. Or political pathology, as you like.

One sentence from a passerby on the street said it all: "He stole, but he also gave."

Nothing spectacular, nothing philosophical, nothing in Latin. Just as the apple interrupted Isaac Newton's fjaka and opened up a whole brave new world of new physics for him, that sentence contains the entire political philosophy of transitional Croatia.

Ideology is not important in this country. Not left or right. What matters is the calculation. If he took, but also shared, then the scales are somehow balanced. Of course, he shared public money, we have not yet heard of anyone among Croatian politicians sharing their own money.

If he distributed public money - then he is good

If a local politician distributed something, built roads, repaired water systems, in other words used tax money for what tax money is for, as someone said - thanking a politician for investing tax money is like thanking an ATM for paying your salary, then our citizens have no problem with a black Audi picking them up every few years. A little bit with a European, a little bit with a national indictment.

When the criterion for choosing a politician becomes "he is ours and he gave it", and you will remember the same story of the eternal mayor of Zagreb, a story that was ultimately resolved by biology, not the will of the voters, then the presumption of innocence becomes a footnote for criminal law exercises, and the indictment just a slight obstacle in the campaign.

While in Europe, resignations are made because a minister buys socks with the wrong card or a politician gets an unusually favorable loan from a bank, here the fact that you are driven around in a black Audi every few years, not because you are a protected person but a suspect, means almost nothing if you used public money to rebuild a local road.

Cross-section of the political culture of society

The state can arrest. The courts can judge. But as long as the ballot box remains the place where the logic of "he stole, but he also gave" is confirmed, nothing significant will change in this country.

A short report from Nova Gradiška is not just a street poll. It is a cross-section of political culture. A society that does not ask "is the system clean", but "did I get what I deserve". And as long as we choose according to the logic of "it's ours", and not according to the logic of "it's clean", the fog will return.

And do you know what it means when the fog returns? It means that black Audis with cheap tires will still be racing through the haze of the A3 highway towards Slavonia, while buses full of Croatian youth will slowly glide in the opposite direction. On the board in front of the passenger seat, the route is written: Osijek - Slavonski Brod - Zagreb - Ljubljana - Munich.

And then everything becomes clear. Not because we were deceived. But because we agreed.