Serbian President Accepts Opposition Demand for New Polls in Capital
Aleksandar Vucic said on Sunday evening that if the largest opposition coalition in Belgrade, United for Serbia, wants to have new elections in the capital, he will propose it to the main board of his ruling Serbian Progressive Party, SNS.
Polls were held across the country on April 3 and the opposition won more votes in Belgrade, but despite this, it will get fewer seats than the ruling parties because of the electoral system.
Dragan Djilas, the president of the Party of Freedom and Justice, which is a part of the United for Serbia coalition, called for new polls because he said that the Belgrade city government will not reflect the will of the people.
Meanwhile Vucic’s SNS did not perform as well as it had hoped in Belgrade.
Vucic said that he thinks that six months need to pass from the elections that were held on April 3 – the final results of which have not yet been announced – but he is ready to go to the polls in the capital even earlier.
He said that he his arch rival Djilas when the two men met on April 11 that the opposition should decide what it wants.
“I think that November is not realistic, I am afraid that it will not suit them then, they should have a think, but in essence my answer is ‘yes’,” Vucic told pro-government Pink TV.
The meeting between Vucic and Djilas surprised the public in Serbia, caused conflict within the opposition and injected fresh uncertainty into the fight for power in the Serbian capital.
It raised eyebrows because Djilas is constantly vilified in pro-government media and has been highly critical of the Progressive Party’s decade in power.
Vucic said he met Djilas because “I am the president of all citizens and I wanted to listen”, adding that everyone knows what he thinks about Djilas and what Djilas thinks about him.
There has been speculation that the meeting was the result of pressure from the West for a pro-European government in Serbia in response to the turbulence unleashed in Europe by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
It has also been suggested that it could have been connected to the fact both Vucic’s SNS and United for Serbia were disappointed by their electoral performances, with the SNS losing 330,000 votes on the last election in 2020 and United for Serbia taking only 13 per cent, doing much worse than polls had suggested. Read More…
