EU approves Croatia’s euro membership on January 1, 2023

Published on: 07/12/2022 – 14:59 Croatia signed the last step on Tuesday allowing it to join the euro zone on January 1, 2023. The country will thus abandon its national currency, the kuna, which will be exchanged at the rate of 7.5345 kuna for 1 euro. Croatia becomes the twentieth state to take the plunge. The Council of the EU, which represents the member countries, adopted, on Tuesday July 12, the last legal acts validating Croatia’s transition to the euro on January 1, 2023. The former Yugoslav Republic will thus become the twentieth member of the euro zone, seven years after the entry of Lithuania. Croatia will abandon its national currency, the kuna, which will be exchanged at the rate of 7.5345 kuna for 1 euro, the Council announced in a press release. “I would like to congratulate my counterpart, Zdravko Maric, and Croatia as a whole “, declared the Czech Minister of Finance, Zbynek Stanjura, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the Council.>> To read also: “The accession of Ukraine to the European Union, mirage or real prospect?” Croatia has successfully fulfilled all the required economic criteria and will pay in euros from January 1, 2023,” he added. The event was marked by a signing ceremony in front of the press in Brussels, in the presence of the President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, the Vice-President of the Commission, Valdis Dombrovskis, and the Commissioner for the Economy Paolo Gentiloni. Weakening of the euro currency The Commission had given the green light to this membership on June 1, believing that Croatia fulfilled all the s conditions. The end of the procedure for Croatia’s accession to the European single currency comes at a time when the currency, which has weakened in recent months in the context of the war in Ukraine, has reached parity with the dollar , for the first time since December 2002. At the start of the year, the euro also celebrated its 20th anniversary as a fiduciary currency. On 1 January 2002, millions of Europeans in twelve countries had given up their lira , francs, deutsche marks and drachmas for euro coins and banknotes. They have since been joined by seven other countries: Slovenia in 2007, Cyprus and Malta in 2008, Slovakia in 2009, Estonia in 2011, Latvia in 2014 and finally Lithuania in 2015. The euro zone already has 345 million inhabitants, pending Croatia. The single currency is a symbol of European unity and sovereignty. All EU countries have theoretically committed to join as soon as they meet the conditions, but no timetable is set. The only exception, Denmark negotiated an exemption after a referendum in 2000 in which the Danes rejected the euro. With AFP