More than a third of respondents in Croatia and Southeast European countries believe that most representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and journalists are corrupt, according to the results of the survey presented at a press conference in the offices of the European Commission Representation in Zagreb earlier this week.
The survey was carried out in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey, on a sample of 1,000 people aged 18 and above in each country.
The survey shows that about 50 percent of respondents in Southeast Europe see corruption as the second biggest societal problem in the period between 2001 and 2016, after unemployment.
In Croatia, compared with 2014, the proportion of people involved in corrupt practices (bribe giving) has decreased, while the corruption pressure (bribe seeking) has increased, which means that Croatian citizens are not always ready to respond to bribery requests and give bribes.
A high proportion of respondents in Croatia said that they did not accept any form of corrupt behaviour, but added that it was highly likely that they would come under corruption pressure in the future.
Mirella Rasic of the European Commission Representation said that the survey showed that corruption was still very present in the lives of many people in Croatia, but the fact that a considerable number of people were willing to say "no" was encouraging.
Maja Baricevic, the head of the Department for Prevention of Corruption at the Ministry of Justice, said that particularly worrying was the increase in the number of people who had been asked to give bribes.
Munir Podumljak, the coordinator of the SELDI anti-corruption network in Croatia, also expressed concern about the increase in corruption pressure in Croatia, which he said had increased by 2.2 percentage points since 2014.
Podumljak said that Turkey had now replaced Croatia as the country with the lowest corruption pressure in Southeast Europe. Commenting on the perceived increase of corruption in the non-governmental sector and media, he said that "civil society and media are slowly ceasing to be mechanisms for the external control of state functions, which brings into question the future of the countries in which the survey was carried out."