The opposition in Serbia promotes protests over alleged fraud in the December elections

The president of Serbia, the conservative nationalist Aleksandar Vucic, is unable to quell the protests that broke out against his administration when two indiscriminate shootings ended the lives of 18 people in May, nine of them minors.

To calm the streets, Vucic brought forward the legislative and local elections in 65 municipalities to December 17.

That initiative spurred the creation of an opposition coalition of eight parties – left, center and right – called Serbia Against Violence (SPN).

The alliance aspired to govern at least in Belgrade, but Vucic's Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) won both the legislative elections and most of the municipal elections, including the capital.

The power of this 53-year-old president was strengthened, but his image is coming under siege.

Since the same day the results appeared, there have been several massive rallies in front of the headquarters of the Electoral Commission of the Republic, in which the Government is accused of electoral fraud.

After more than 10 days without demonstrations, thousands of people protested again in Belgrade on Tuesday, January 16.

That same week, the coalition presented an appeal to the country's Constitutional Court to annul the local elections in the capital.

Biljana Djordjevic, co-president of the Green Front-Left party, points out by videoconference that the “fraud” has not only occurred in local elections, but also in legislative elections.

“But the most compelling evidence is in Belgrade,” she says.

Djordjevic assures that Belgrade was where the meaning of the vote was changed and “what was a majority (of the opposition) became a minority.”

Biljana Djordjevic explains that the opposition coalition had many volunteers to control the polling stations.

“That's why we saw how many people arrived in Belgrade by bus from other municipalities and even from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

We discovered that they met at the Stark Arena, a large sports hall, built in 2005 for the European Basketball Championship, where concerts are usually held.

There they concentrated these electoral tourists;

There they received instructions so they knew where they had to go to vote.

When citizens alerted us, members of the Electoral Commission came to the pavilion, but the facility's security personnel did not allow them to enter.

The police did not show up and eventually the Electoral Commission claimed that it had no powers to deal with this.”

In the legislative elections, the Serbian Progressive Party obtained 129 of the 250 seats in Parliament, with 46.8% of the votes, while Serbia Against Violence (SPN) only garnered 23.7% of the votes and 65 deputies.

However, in the municipal elections of Belgrade the distance was closer: the ruling SNS won with 39.1% of the votes compared to 34.6% for SPN.

Less than five percentage points and 41,810 votes difference were enough, according to the opposition alliance, to turn around the elections in the country's main city, where 1.4 million inhabitants and a quarter of the Serbian electorate live.

Vucic, who has governed Serbia in the last decade, three years as prime minister (2014-2017) and the last seven as president, maintains excellent relations with Vladimir Putin's Russia, while trying to strengthen ties with Brussels, as an official candidate for the accession to the European Union.

Two days after the elections, the EU High Representative for Foreign Policy, Josep Borrell, and the European Neighborhood Commissioner, Oliver Varhelyi, released a joint statement in which they expressed their “concern” about the “tangible improvements and new reforms”. ” that the electoral process suffered from.

And they warned: “We also expect that credible allegations of irregularities will be subject to transparent follow-up by the competent national authorities.

This also includes complaints related to local elections in Belgrade and other municipalities.”

However, in the same way that Vucic navigates between the waters of Moscow and Brussels, EU authorities try to take care of the relationship with an indispensable partner for controlling irregular migration and maintaining the precarious peace in the Balkans.

“Illegal voter migration”

The Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA), based in Belgrade, claims to have monitored the electoral process with 3,000 observers on the ground.

This civil society group already warned before the elections about something that, according to the independent group itself, ended up happening: the illegal migration of voters, the massive displacement of voters to places where they were not registered.

Rasa Nedeljkov, program director of CRTA, gave a speech last Wednesday to the members of the European Union Affairs Committee of the German Parliament in which he spoke to them about the “political pressures” to which “dozens of citizens” were subjected. to vote for Vucic's party.

Nedeljkov described the case of a woman with cancer who was waiting for a surgical intervention that could save her life.

“They asked him to do favors for the party so that, in exchange, they would advance the date of the operation,” said the CRTA director.

Nedeljkov added to the German parliamentarians that on election day his organization found that 10% of the polling stations in Belgrade and 5% of those in the parliamentary elections were “contaminated” with “serious irregularities”, such as vote buying. and the violation of the secrecy of the vote, among others.

“In Belgrade, CRTA also detected patterns of organized voter migration and problems in voter registration in 14% of polling stations,” he said.

The activist noted in his speech that what CRTA observers revealed “is just the tip of the iceberg.”

He said his organization observed a pattern of behavior in which “people's primary residence, necessary to vote in local elections, was changed to Belgrade just before the elections, in an organized and corrupt manner;

These people were registered in groups, (…) they were accompanied to vote.

And, after the elections, it was removed from the Voter Registry.”

“This operation,” Nedeljkov continued, “can only have been orchestrated within the institutions: the Ministry of the Interior, which maintains the registry of residents;

the Ministry of State Administration and Local Self-Government, which maintains the Voter Registry;

and the local autonomies, which update the Voter Registry of their territories.”

Actions before the international community

Biljana Djordjevic, the co-president of the Green Front-Left, maintains that the opposition will continue its fight through demonstrations, appeals to the Constitutional Court and actions before the international community.

An article published on January 13 by the

Financial Times

asked why the European Union is so “soft” on Serbia.

The author noted: “One wonders whether the West's effort to work constructively with Vucic is producing any real benefits.

Regarding the quality of Serbian democracy, a pro-Western foreign policy and the search for a settlement for Kosovo, the answer seems to be a resounding no.”

Nedeljkov, the program director of CRTA, told this newspaper by videoconference: “The average Serbian citizen is a victim of the manipulation of the media by the Government.

But, despite everything, there are still people here willing to defend European values.

But we need a little help from nations like Spain, Germany or France.

We need the authoritarian regime in Serbia to be condemned and the will of the people fighting for European values ​​to be recognized.”

Aleksandra Tomanic, director of the NGO European Fund for The Balkans, said by phone: “Democracy has been threatened in Serbia for many years.

But now the fraud has reached another dimension.

That is why it is important for international organizations to react.

Not only for democracy in Serbia, but for its own credibility.”

This newspaper has tried without success to obtain the version of the Serbian presidency, which has denied accusations of electoral fraud in the local media.

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