Serbia’s political crisis: Vucic versus the rest

The ruling Serbian Progressive Party of President Aleksandar Vucic won the snap parliamentary elections, according to the country’s election commission. Vucic’s party garnered 46.72 per cent of the vote, the centre-left alliance of Serbia Against Violence got 23.56 per cent of the vote, a clear 23 per cent behind Vucic’s party, and the Socialist Party of Serbia came last with 6.56 per cent of the vote.

The international monitoring team found the elections to be unfair with Vucic having an unfair advantage in media coverage and it is being alleged that money was paid for votes. Protesters crowded Belgrade streets calling for the annulment of not just the parliamentary election but also the local polls. Vucic says the elections were fair.  

Interestingly, Vucic has not contested the elections though he was the domineering figure in the campaign. The Serbian Progressive Party had campaigned in the name of Vucic, and people had voted for him when they voted for his party. He and his party have been in office since 2012, and the reason for his electoral victories in this period is the fact that there has not been a strong opposition. The inference is that Serbians have been voting for Vucic and his party because there is no alternative. Rasa Nedeljkov, programme director of the election monitor, Centre for Research, Transparency and Acountability (CRTA) says, “Sixty per cent of the people think Vucic is the candidate – whether in the national or in the local elections.”

Vucic is the dominant political figure in the country, and he is a pro-European Union (EU) politician, and Serbia is waiting to be admitted to the UN. Meanwhile, Vucic had focused on building infrastructure and boosted economic growth. He had shed his earlier image of an ultra-nationalist politician who had served as the information minister of the infamous Slobodan Milosevic, whose fanatical Serbian nationalism had been one of the reasons for the break-up of former Yugoslavia. Vucic had reinvented himself when he formed the Serbian Progressive Party in 2008, and the party had won parliamentary elections in 2012, and he became the deputy prime minister in the coalition governments with the socialists. He became the prime minister in 2014 and won the presidential election in 2017.

His pro-EU politics can be traced to the years he had spent in London, where he migrated after NATO had bombed Belgrade and Kosovo, which was a Muslim Albanian-majority province in Serbia, broke away. Vucic had adopted a pragmatic attitude towards Kosovo though is he conscious of the acutely-anti-Kosovo sentiment of the majority of Serbians. But he has strived to make Serbia a strong market-oriented economy and he had succeeded, and it is one of the reasons for his popularity. But his opponents claim that he achieved economic growth at the price of democracy, and that Vucic had undermined democratic freedoms.

Vucic had not contested because he had completed the mandatory two terms as president, and he cannot contest for a third term. But he has managed to steer his party to a victory, which is now being questioned. Vucic said about the protests that the government was taking a softer view towards the protestors. But the opposition blames Vucic for creating an atmosphere of violence and intolerance which had led to mass shootings in May this year, and which was the reason for the demand for the latest round of elections. But the paradox remains that Vucic is no longer a political player and yet his party wins because of Vucic’s projecting his image. What is evident is that despite forming a coalition, Serbia Against Violence, the opposition parties seem to have failed to convince the majority of the voters.