Milanovic expressed hope that unemployment would start to fall by the end of the year, but noted that he could not make any firm promises.

"All our efforts are directed at that goal. The fact that we have retained the credit rating is a small comfort to us. What we need is an increase of the rating and a reduction of the risk premium, only then will we be able to finance major projects on our own," the prime minister said. "It is up to us to decide whether we want to be a competitive economy and a country that is not dependent on credit ratings," he added.

Speaking of appointments to the supervisory boards of state-owned companies, Milanovic said that wherever national interests are involved it should be clear who is responsible. He said that his government has not appointed a single politician or official to the supervisory boards of state-owned companies because it adheres to the law, which it considers bad because the previous government negotiated it with the EU "outside the classic acquis communautaire" because it was "weak and corruption ridden".

"We won't be doing that in the future either, but as a democratically elected government we don't want to waive our right, wherever we estimate that there is a national interest, be it INA or exceptionally any other company, to appoint people who will represent responsibility with their name," Milanovic said.

He said that in the oil company INA, which is 46% owned by the government, the ministers on the Supervisory Board would be outvoted because Croatia had lost the majority in previous years. He said that in Germany, France and other countries politicians were present on the supervisory boards of big companies, adding that a premier of the German state of Lower Saxony had been a member of the Supervisory Board of the car maker Volkswagen.

"We're a state, we're not a colony. We're a small, self-aware state, we know that there are more productive, stronger and bigger ones than us, but we must defend our interests, especially where our intentions are right and where we can't do anything else. Therefore we won't renounce the rights that are vital to us," the prime minister said.

Responding to the interviewer's remark that he would not be able to do it because that was what his predecessor had negotiated with the EU, Milanovic said that that was not true and that the government would insist on protecting Croatia's national interests. He said that ministers would not be sitting on supervisory boards because they would be in conflict of interest.

When asked if Parliament should be the political sponsor of anniversary ceremonies commemorating the execution by Tito's Partisans of Croatian Nazi collaborators at Bleiburg, Austria, which occurred at the end of the Second World War, Milanovic described the Bleiburg ceremonies as controversial. "The fact is that they do not commemorate victims because there were none. They commemorate an army. Victims were elsewhere, a large number of victims. If we are to commemorate them, and we should because those were innocent people, we should focus on those sites," he said, adding that this topic was traumatic for Croatia and required discussion.