“With a strong conviction that our demands are just, we note that the roots of government corruption have penetrated too deeply into state institutions, which are thus prevented from performing their duties independently.”

This is what the students in the blockade said when they announced the demand for extraordinary parliamentary elections.

“We call on the people to support the list to which the students in the blockade of all higher education institutions in the territory of Serbia will transfer their trust, so that truth may prevail on the scales of justice,” the students state, thereby saying—they will support the list, but will not necessarily be on it.

The opposition is already speaking out—the Democratic Party has put itself at the students’ disposal, offering infrastructure, expertise, but also its withdrawal from the electoral process if students articulate the demand for elections. The Ecological Uprising has also supported the students’ demands and, as stated, called on all environmental organisations and citizens to do the same.

Savo Manojlović also supported the student demand for calling elections: “To usurp politics and reserve it for existing parties means engaging in politics for the concentration of power, not for serving the people,” said Manojlović.

Parliamentary elections – will Vučić be in them?

Since 2012, when the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) came to power, there have been a total of 14 electoral cycles in Serbia, including six parliamentary elections, both regular and extraordinary.

For years, analysts have agreed that Serbia is in a permanent pre-election campaign. Representatives of the government agree with this, at least on a symbolic level, if we remember Ana Brnabić’s statement from 2020: “...If someone says that someone is in campaign all the time, as they say for Aleksandar Vučić and SNS, logically, if you are always in a campaign, then you are never in a campaign.”

The SNS wins the majority of votes cycle after cycle and forms the majority in the Assembly, relishing the position of power that comes from poor electoral conditions but also, it must be said, often misguided political tactics of the opposition, well illustrated by the boycott in 2020 and in June 2024.

Surveys of party ratings show, however, that the SNS is on a downward trend. The latest data from Đorđe Vukadinović from March this year show that the SNS and its coalition partners have the support of about a third of citizens.

Common sense suggests that questions about how much support there actually is, especially when taking into account all the circumstances that are currently important factors in the electoral calculation, as well as how Vučić will manage to transfer his rating from the position of president to a party that is in such decline or a movement that has not taken root.

What happened to electoral conditions?

Nothing has happened regarding the electoral conditions in Serbia. The working group for the implementation of ODIHR recommendations, which was supposed to translate all the critical points of the electoral process into legislative changes, has not managed to do much.

“The key factor in the disagreement of this working group was the Draft Law on the Unified Electoral Register. The draft by the CRTA organisation was not satisfactory for the government representatives, so they came out with their own draft law. The biggest difference was who would make up the commission to review the electoral register. Government representatives did not show an ounce of goodwill to get things moving from a dead point, and that’s where it stopped,” said MP Danijela Nestorović for Insider.

As Insider writes in its analysis, the issue of revising the electoral register has crystallised as primary among all ODIHR recommendations, all the more so since the entire crisis of electoral legitimacy in December 2023 arose from suspicion of “electoral tourism”. “The accusations by the opposition and part of the civil sector that the election results are illegitimate due to numerous machinations were confirmed in the report of ODIHR, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. Soon, ODIHR also published a list of recommendations that should be corrected to improve the electoral process. Of the 25 recommendations, seven are defined as priority—apart from the revision of the electoral register, these include, among other things, the establishment of an independent REM, the prohibition of officials’ campaigning, and the prevention of pressure on voters and employees in public enterprises.”

Just as the re-election of the REM Council came up, elections arrived. The Parliamentary Committee on Culture and Information met last week, breaking all legal deadlines and noting the annulment of the previous process of electing members of the REM Council, and announcing a new competition.

This was preceded by a two-week student blockade of Radio Television of Serbia, but this process would have occurred at some point even without this blockade. However, the pressure may have accelerated the process, which may now fall into deep oblivion with the calling of elections and the beginning of the campaign.

And REM is important, precisely because of the media narratives that students in the blockade have criticised throughout all six months of blockades and protests.

Thus, the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, whose students in the blockade most criticised the election for the REM Council, reminded in January “that numerous domestic and international organisations have for years pointed to a continuous decline in media freedoms in Serbia, political and financial pressure that threatens independence and editorial autonomy, the presence of soft censorship in the most accessible media, the absence of media pluralism, the neglect of the principles of ethical and professional codes, and the violation of relevant laws. We remind that these problems have been identified by a series of national media documents, including the Strategy for the Development of the Public Information System for the period 2020-2025 adopted by the previous Government of the Republic of Serbia. Unfortunately, apart from noting the problems, there has been no active and substantial work on solving them.”

M.M. and I.P.M.