Benčić Demands Personal Response from Plenković
The MP from the Možemo party has asked the Prime Minister to personally come to Gospić and answer who is responsible for the environmental disaster in Lika.
The MP from the Možemo party has asked the Prime Minister to personally come to Gospić and answer who is responsible for the environmental disaster in Lika.
On Monday, August 10, 2026, Sandra Benčić, an MP from the Možemo party, issued a sharp public challenge to Prime Minister Andrej Plenković, demanding that he personally explain how the government could issue permits for the import of hazardous waste while simultaneously claiming that Croatia lacks the capacity to process it. She posed the question in a video message, directly linking it to the illegal landfill in Gospić.
"A question for Prime Minister Plenković: if Croatia lacks the capacity to remediate the waste in Lika, how is it that your government issued permits for the import of such waste?" Benčić asked in a recording shared by the party, calling on the Prime Minister and the responsible ministers to appear in Gospić on Friday at the extraordinary session of the Committee on Environmental and Nature Protection, which was convened by Dušica Radojčić, also a member of Možemo.
Benčić insisted that responsibility cannot be shifted to other members of the government, stating: "Prime Minister Plenković, you must answer this." The explanation that Croatia lacks the capacity for rapid remediation, she added, raises an even more serious question: "How is it possible that your government issued permits for the import of such waste? What exactly did you think, where would that waste end up?"
She emphasized that she expects an answer solely from the Prime Minister, saying: "Not Minister Vučković, not some intermediary of yours, only you," leaving no room for mediation or delegating the issue to lower levels of the executive branch.
The challenge comes after the findings of USKOK confirmed that the illegal landfill in Gospić caused environmental and groundwater pollution across the entire Lika region. Benčić had already on Saturday, August 8, called on the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Green Transition to urgently initiate the remediation of the illegal hazardous waste landfill, and at the site itself she stated that this is "the biggest ecocide in recent decades."
"This is a place where the Croatian state allowed its own capitulation, and a capitulation in favor of profit that remained in private pockets," she asserted. She added that the damage remains not only for the citizens of Gospić, and it is immeasurable, but also as financial damage for all citizens of the Republic of Croatia who will have to pay for the remediation.
Benčić claimed that institutions knew about the illegal waste dumping but failed to react. "For at least a year and a half, the ministry has known that waste was being illegally dumped here and that there may be hazardous waste whose chemicals could seep into groundwater," she said, pointing to systematic stalling.
The ministry, as she noted, did not move on the issue of remediation until this week, and now it is invoking the public procurement procedure, even though it was precisely because of the urgency that this process could have been bypassed. "They wouldn't need to go into public procurement if they had started remediation immediately upon learning of the urgency. But because they've been 'sitting' on that information for a year and a half without doing anything, we won't be able to use that exception from European rules to avoid waiting for public procurement due to urgency," Benčić concluded.
