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Zagreb - Croatian lawmakers are becoming less interesting to citizens, as shown by data on visits to their personal websites last year released by Parliament.
The data shows that citizens made fewer visits to those websites in 2022 than in 2021.
The websites of the three top ranking MPs -- Mirela Ahmetović (Social Democratic Party, SDP), Ivana Kekin (Green Left Bloc) and Sabina Glasovac (SDP) -- together attracted slightly more views than Sandra Benčić (We Can!) had in 2021 alone. Their websites were viewed 7,573 times (Ahmetović attracted 2,668 views, Kekin 2,568 and Glasovac 2,337), while Benčić's was visited 7,109 times last year.
This is far from figures of seven or eight years ago when the personal website of Goran Marić (Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ) recorded over 10,000 visits in just one semester.
In 2022, the top five websites included those of Sandra Benčić (1,754 visits) and HDZ MP Majda Burić (1,453).
Only the websites of 20 out of 151 lawmakers were visited more than a thousand times each.
Interestingly, the website of Marijan Kustić (HDZ), who does not sit in the present Parliament, recorded 1,256 views, probably due to the fact that he serves as President of the Croatian Football Federation and as such he played a role in the success of the Croatian national team in the 2022 World Cup championship in Qatar.
Last year, the Croatian Parliament discussed 391 items on its agenda, and members of the public were mostly interested in amendments to the Labour Act and the proposal to amend the Science and Higher Education Act, which attracted 3,826 and 3,383 views respectively.
Citizens also read articles on national holidays, such as Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day (21,000 views), Independence Day (19,000 views) and Statehood Day (17,000 views).
Parliament's website also recorded a lot of views during the summit of the Crimea Platform, when 12,330 people visited the website on 24-26 October 2022. Articles on this event in Croatian were viewed over 15,000 times and those in English over 2,600 times.
In 2022, Parliament's website recorded 3.2 million views, with 418,000 individuals accessing the website. Each visitor on average spent three and a half minutes per visit.