[ rfe/rl banner ]

Polls Close In Serbian Parliamentary Elections As Vucic Eyes Victory

April 24, 2016
by RFE/RL

Polls have closed in Serbia's parliamentary elections that are expected to hand victory to Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, who urged voters to endorse his drive toward the EU while maintaining close ties with Russia.

Following a sluggish start, the pace of voting picked up in the April 24 elections, with some 47.7 percent of the country's 6.7 million voters having cast their ballots two hours prior to the closing of the polls.

Total turnout was expected to surpass the 53 percent threshold registered in Serbia's 2012 parliamentary elections.

"I am almost certain that we will carry on our European integration process and we will have to speed up the process of [EU] accession," Vucic said as he cast his vote on April 24. "And of course, preserve our traditional ties with our friends [Russia] in the east."

After voting, Vucic wrote on Twitter, "We fought honestly, I expect Serbia to choose the future."

Early unofficial projections based on exit polling indicated Vucic's center-right Serbian Progressive Party would capture more than 50 percent of the vote.

An initial projection by the independent CeSID monitoring agency based on a small sample of votes said Vucic's party is set to win around 56 percent of votes cast in the election.

The left-leaning Socialist Party of Serbia was set to remain the second-biggest party in parliament, while the ultra-nationalist Radical Party of Vojislav Seselj, acquitted last month of war crimes by a UN tribunal in The Hague, is set to be the third-largest party in parliament, CeSID projected.

The first results in the election -- Serbia's third in four years -- were expected before midnight local time.

Vucic called the vote two years ahead of schedule and says that he needs a stronger mandate than the 131 seats that the Serbian Progressive Party now controls -- just over half the 250 seats in parliament.

Formerly an ultranationalist who supported the idea of a Greater Serbia, Vucic now presents himself as a pro-European reformer.

Vuvic and his governing coalition partners narrowly missed securing a two-thirds majority in the 2014 vote, when they won 158 seats.

He says a stronger mandate would help him achieve his stated goals of bringing Serbia closer to European Union membership and bolstering the economy by pushing through reforms required by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Opinion polls suggested just days before the election that Vucic's party could win about half of the ballots -- enough to take more than half of the seats under a system in which only parties that receive at least 5 percent of the vote are awarded seats.

In addition to a possible two-thirds majority with coalition partners, political analysts will be watching closely to see if Vucic strengthens his party's presence and can control a majority on its own.

They also will be watching to see if there are gains by Vucic's current governing coalition partner, the Socialist Party of Serbia, which is running on a separate ticket.

Formed by the late Slobodan Milosevic and led by Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic, the Socialists were projected to receive 11.3 percent of the April 24 vote.

Currently, the Socialists control 25 seats, making it the second-largest party in parliament.

But the Socialists have opposed the large-scale privatization of loss-generating state firms called for by Brussels as a condition of closer EU integration, and that the IMF has made a condition of a 1.2 billion-euro ($1.35 billion) loan.

In fact, the Socialists' opposition to privatization deals has caused tension with Vucic, who has said he needs a good review in May from the IMF on Belgrade's reforms or it would be "very difficult" for him "to be the prime minister."

The Social Democratic Party of Serbia, led by ethnic Bosniak politician and Trade Minister Rasim Ljajic, rounds out the current governing coalition with nine seats in the National Assembly.

The Social Democrats are a part of the Alliance For a Better Serbia -- a coalition that also includes the Liberal Democratic Party of Serbia and the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina.

Opinion polls suggest Serbia's splintered centrist and left-leaning opposition groups will come close to surpassing the 5 percent mark needed to get into the legislature. Among current opposition politicians, polls showed two blocs hovering just above the threshold.

One is a conservative anti-NATO group that links the Democratic Party of Serbia and Dveri.

The other, called Fair For Serbia, is a centrist group of parties led by former Democratic Party leader Boris Tadic and Cedomir Jovanovic.

Ultranationalists and pro-Russian parties that have not had representation in parliament since 2012 also hope they will be able to gain seats. Opinion surveys suggest they could win a total of about 10 to 15 percent of the vote.

The one most likely to clear the 5 percent threshold is the Radical Party led by Seselj, a former deputy prime minister who spent 11 years in a UN detention center during his war crimes trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

In March, The Hague-based court found Seselj not guilty on all of the war crimes charges against him arising from the 1990s Balkan wars.

Seselj, whose core ideology is based on the goal of creating a Greater Serbia, has himself publicly burned EU and NATO flags. He has also campaigned for closer ties with Russia rather than the EU, saying that would help Serbia overcome its "economic misery."

Vucic, a former Seselj ally, said as he cast his ballot in a rainy Belgrade suburb that he "not going to make any compromise" with right-wing parties.

The head of Serbia's Government Office of Kosovo, Marko Djuric, said that polling stations will be open in Serb-inhabited areas of Kosovo.

More than 110 countries recognize the independence of mostly ethnic Albanian Kosovo, but Belgrade insists it remains a province of Serbia.

Kosovo's constitution allows for dual citizenship for the Serbian community.

In previous Serbian elections, the government in Pristina did not allow Serbia's Election Commission to organize balloting within Kosovo. But the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) reached a deal with Pristina that will allow the organization to collect the votes of Kosovo Serbs.

The OSCE carried out a similar role in Kosovo for Serbia's 2012 and 2014 parliamentary elections.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Balkan Service, dpa, Reuters, AP, AFP, and B-92

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/serbia-vucic-seeks- more-power-in-early-elections/27693341.html

NEWSLETTER

Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list

Military

Polls Close In Serbian Parliamentary Elections As Vucic Eyes Victory