Election of the weekend: Serbia

This Sunday, parliamentary elections will be held in Serbia, along with local elections in 65 cities and municipalities, including Belgrade, and elections for the Assembly of the autonomous province of Vojvodina. All of these elections are occurring ahead of schedule–Vojvodina and Belgrade elections were scheduled for 2024, parliamentary and most other local elections for 2026–but then-president Aleksandar Vučić announced a snap election and the consolidation of all upcoming elections earlier this year, but with the final date not being settled and determined until just a few months ago.

Serbian politics have long been dominated by Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), an unwieldy beast of a party that has been alternatively classified as populist, catch-all, big tent, neoliberal, socially conservative, and illiberal. All of these appear to capture some element of their governing ideology; but perhaps the most important thing about them is that they share with other, more straightforwardly right-populist parties a notable lack of respect for democracy itself:

At first glance, Serbia’s snap December elections offer more of the same – a smear campaign against the opposition in pro-government tabloids, the unfair exploitation of state resources by the ruling Progressive Party, and a president promising welfare handouts despite, officially, having no constitutional say over such policies nor any party position.

The parties in power are “abusing the institutions” in their election campaigns, “erasing the border between the state and the party”, Rasa Nedeljkovic, head of the Belgrade-based Centre for Transparency, Research and Accountability, CRTA, told a press conference on November 23.

The strategy looks likely to pay dividends at the parliamentary level, returning another Progressive-led government, but the difference this time could come in the capital, Belgrade, where pollsters are tipping the opposition to take power having narrowly missed out last year.

Here’s another account of SNS’s electoral shenanigans, along with a hopeful argument regarding their declining effectiveness:

Novica Petrovic, an employee in the local administration of the Serbian city of Kragujevac, was suddenly transferred to a new workplace in the abandoned office of the Bukorovac local community.

Before his transfer, Petrovic had refused to promise to secure votes for President Aleksandar Vucic and his ruling Serbian Progressive Party in the upcoming legislative elections on December 17.

Those familiar with the political situation in Serbia will recognise that this was revenge for disobedience.

This is the way Serbia’s authorities behave before every election – and they do not even try to hide it.

Petrovic claims his superiors told him: “You will be kicked out because of this” – and he was duly “kicked out”, 10 kilometers away to damp premises with poor working conditions.

Since Vucic and Progressive Party came to power in Serbia in 2012, thousands of people in state institutions and companies have been pressured not only into voting for them but into participating in the election campaign.

They are pressed to guarantee that a certain number of their family members and friends will vote for the party. Those who do not, or cannot fulfil, this can expect to be transferred to a worse job – or fired.

Serbia’s opposition Party of Freedom and Justice said on November 27, for example, that teachers in the town of Uzice were being forced to conduct a door-to-door campaign to gather votes for the Progressive Party. It said teachers were being forced by the school management to do this “work”.

The examples from Kragujevac and Uzice are just a small part of the main characteristic of Vucic’s regime – an absence of any dialogue with those who do not think the same way, and the creation of societal divisions – “Whoever is not with us is against us”.

State institutions work according to the dictates of one party and one leader. These are ideal conditions for the growth of an atmosphere of fear and violence. And that is the dominant pre-election climate in Serbia.

Observers from the Centre for Research, Transparency and Accountability, CRTA, a non-governmental organisation that monitors election activities, said on November 23 that it had recorded several cases of violence against political activists and citizens, including verbal and physical attacks and threats to property. It also said the violent atmosphere was intensifying as the election campaign progressed; five incidents were registered in just three days, from November 20 to 22.

Why hold elections now, only 19 months after the last election? There appear to be two primary reasons. First, in 2022 the SNS’s list lost over 1/3 of their seats in parliament, dropping them down to 120/250. (SNS does have a supermajority in the Vojvodina assembly from their last election in 2020; this shouldn’t be taken to indicate any particular SNS strength in the northern province, as many leading opposition parties encouraged their supporters to boycott the election.) The opposition was hopelessly fractured and there was no chance of any stitched-together coalition putting them in opposition, but the need to work with others has proven challenging for the SNS, who burned through 3 cabinets in a little over a year. They also appear to have been in part a response to a series of mass protests that erupted in Belgrade and elsewhere in the Spring. In early May, Serbia experienced two horrific mass shooting events in less than 48 hours. In the first shooting, a 13 year old student, using his father’s guns, killed eight of his classmates and a guard, wounding several others, on school grounds in Belgrade. The next day, Uroš Blažić, a hot-tempered and violent twenty year old who had been protected from serious legal consequences by his powerful father for a range of criminal acts including assaulting a police officer, used an assault rifle and several pistols owned by his family to murder nine people and injure fourteen others. (Some of the victims were friends he’d recently been arguing with; others appear to have been random).

Despite fairly strict gun control laws, Serbia is, by global standards, awash in guns (which is to say it has the highest per-capita gun ownership rate in Europe, or roughly 1/3 the rate in the United States), many of which were leftover from the wars of the 1990’s. And while there had been a few other mass shootings in the 21st century, these two appear to have triggered a significant civil society response. Mass protests calling for resignations at the highest levels began just a few days after shootings in Belgrade, and continued throughout the summer, spreading to Novi Sad, Nis, and various smaller cities. A number of opposition political parties quickly sought to associate themselves with, and help organize, these ongoing protests, and those parties have come together for these elections under the banner of the “Serbians Against Violence” list. It is probably over optimistic to hope for this list to actually win the election–polling has the SNS-led list, “Serbia Must Not Stop,” list dipping just below the 40% line, making it seem possible or perhaps even likely they might dip below their 44% low mark in 2022. Serbians Against Violence is polling in the mid-20’s. The rest of the opposition is deeply fractured and includes some pretty freaky far-right and pro-Russia parties that would not, to put it mildly, be attractive potential coalition partners for the Serbians Against Violence list, so some sort of Poland-like alliance of center, left, and non-ruling party aligned right seems improbable. Many election observers believe that despite polling it is more likely than not SNS will regain the outright majority they lost in 2022. One reason for this could be corruption, graft, and cheating, but also, with 18 lists on the ballot and a 3% threshold for non-national minorities parties, they are likely to be the primary beneficiary of wasted votes under the D’Hondt counting method utilized in Serbian elections. The various right-wing parties, in particular, may end up wasting a lot of votes through their failure to consolidate into viable lists.

While it appears unlikely SNS will be kept out of power nationally, many opposition forces are holding out hope for a better result in Belgrade, where the 110-seat City assembly is up for election. Opposition made great strides in Belgrade in 2022 in terms of votes, but the vagaries of the Belgrade assembly electoral system and a stray vote from an independent (and deranged Monarchist) councilor allowed them to retain power with the help of Serbian Socialist Party (Milosevic’s old party has a long history of collaborating with various right wing interests and probably should be classified as right wing themselves). Opposition forces hope to make gains that might allow them to take control of the largest city’s government, and elect a non-SNS mayor.

“The opposition has a strong chance of winning in the capital, Belgrade,” said sociologist Srecko Mihailovic, a pollster at the Serbian Research-Publishing Centre, Demostat.

Last year, the opposition in Belgrade won around 50,000 votes more than the parties of the ruling coalition, but missed out on power when the votes were turned into seats.

“The opposition now probably has even better results, but they need to be careful, because there are many civil servants in Belgrade and people employed in state institutions who will come under pressure to vote for the ruling party,” Mihailovic told BIRN.

The Kosovo crisis, of course, continues to loom over this election. The official Serbian line is that Kosovo remains an autonomous province of Serbia, administratively akin to Vojvodina in the North. Kosovo’s government sees things rather differently, and elections will not be held in Kosovo on Sunday. However, following a new precedent from the 2022 election, ethnic Serbs residing in Kosovo will be allowed to participate, should they cross the border and vote at polling stations set up for them in 4 Serbian border towns. The ongoing political stalemate in Kosovo has forced its way back onto the political agenda in part due to the North Kosovo crisis that kicked off last summer. The alleged proximate cause of this crisis is quite remarkable; rather than attempt to make sense of it enough to summarize it with a straight face I’m just going to go ahead and quote wikipedia here:

Beginning on 31 July 2022, tensions between Kosovo and Serbia heightened due to the expiration of the eleven-year validity period of documents for cars on 1 August 2022, between the government of Kosovo and the Serbs in North Kosovo. Kosovo, which declared independence in 2008, signed an agreement with Serbia in 2011 that determined the use of license plates in North Kosovo. This agreement was supposed to change license plates from the ones that were issued by Serbia to neutral ones. The agreement for the change was extended in 2016 and expired in 2021, which led to a crisis in 2021 that ended with an agreement to terminate the ban of Kosovo-issued license plates in Serbia.

After a Kosovo announcement that Serbian citizens who enter Kosovo will receive entry and exit documents, a number of barricades were created in North Kosovo on 31 July 2022 but were removed two days later after Kosovo announced that it would postpone the ban on license plates issued by Serbia. In August 2022, unsuccessful negotiations regarding license plates were held, although the ID document dispute was solved. A proposed agreement, dubbed the “German-French proposal” by the media, would be the basis of consultations beginning in January 2023.

The tensions have continued in North Kosovo and in September culminated in the Banjska attack, in which a group of Serbian militants, including some Kosovar Serbs, attacked Kosovo police forces, killing one and wounding two others, before barricading themselves inside a monastery where a number of Novi Sad religious pilgrims were currently residing. Their removal by force a few days later led to three more deaths and six arrests. One of the militants was Milan Radoičić, the Vice President of Serb List, the leading Serbian party in Kosovo, with close ties to the SNS, and the SNS-led government declared a “national day of mourning” for the three deceased militants after the incident.

Which is to say, the Kosovo situation is hotter than it’s been in over a decade, and it is a major issue in this election. The SNS is leaning heavily on a “voting for the opposition is voting for an independent and sovereign Kosovo” message, accompanied by dire warnings about the fate of dual-citizen ethnic Serbs in Kosovo should this come to pass. The Serbia Against Violence coalition contains parties that are at least open to supporting Kosovo’s independence as well as parties that share with both the SNS and pretty much all right wing parties a desire to retain control over Kosovo. Many in the SAV coalition have attempted to avoid the Kosovo question, while others have staked out a middle ground (opposed to succession, but in favor of normalization of relations as a step toward reconciliation).

Voting takes place Sunday. TL, DR rooting interests for those with LGM-aligned politics broadly speaking: Opposition takeover of Belgrade City Assembly, and keeping SNS out of an outright majority along side a strong showing for the Serbia Against Violence list in parliament. Also noteworthy to see how far SNS falls in Vojvodina, with opposition parties no longer boycotting.