Crowning the forwards and damage control

Will there be extraordinary parliamentary elections? What about the almost-already-forgotten announcement that the Belgrade elections will be held in the spring of this year? What can citizens expect from the political offer, will there be boycotts again and what kind of electoral conditions does the opposition face? These were the questions we discussed with Dušan Vučićević, associate professor at the Belgrade Faculty of Political Sciences.

"WEATHER" Last year, Vučić immediately after the election "term deposit" two-year term of government, ie, until spring 2024, which coincides with the term for local elections in Serbia. Immediately after the election, Vučić and Đilas met "agreed" that the Belgrade elections be called either in the fall of 2022. or in spring 2023. No, now it's obvious that won't happen. Will there be parliamentary elections and when??

DUŠAN VUCIĆEVIĆ: It was not realistic for the city elections to be held in the spring of 2023, because the difference in Belgrade was too small to risk new elections that were not combined with the parliamentary ones. It was much easier for the parties in power to find some more councilors from among the opposition and consolidate that thin majority with them. It is more of a question for the politicians who believed it would happen. When it comes to announcements for extraordinary elections, the president literally on the day of the election already appointed the Government for two years. He, of course, has no authority when it comes to term-limiting the mandate of the Government and the Assembly - he can dissolve the National Assembly only if it votes no confidence in the Government and if the Government resigns and a new one is not elected, or if the Government makes a reasoned proposal to the President, and then he dissolved the Assembly.

But we are already used to the president announcing that there will be new elections, getting that government proposal and dissolving the assembly. Bearing in mind that he announced it, I expect elections in 2024. I do not claim that they will be certain, because I think that estimates of the benefits and costs of holding them will be made then, and definitely one of the good reasons for them to be announced is that in the spring of next year, provincial and local elections will be held in a large number of local self-government. Our electoral practice - not only during the time of the Serbian Progressive Party but also before - is that local elections were often combined with national ones. Likewise, we know that the SNS holsters with staff in certain municipalities, just like the radicals before the creation of the SNS, achieved weaker results at the local level compared to the national ones. From that point of view, it makes more sense for the SNS to call parliamentary elections at the same time in order to cover those local shortcomings and with the party leader, who is also the president of the republic, increase that result.

But they are in power practically everywhere except in a few municipalities.

Yes, but there are several municipalities in Belgrade that could very easily slip out of the SNS's hands, there are two big cities - Niš and Novi Sad - where I would not be so sure that the SNS would easily win a majority, especially if the local elections were separate from parliamentary ones. If we look at the results of the referendum from January last year, and then the parliamentary and presidential elections in those cities, we see that the SNS did not have an absolute majority there, it was far from that. We don't know what will happen in the next 6-9 months, but we see that SNS has quite successfully coped with the increase in prices in terms of communication. We are also waiting to see what will happen with the Franco-German proposal for Kosovo.

Isn't it easy to deal with anything if you control almost all the media?

It is, but again it can be crowned - more and more people are using social networks, the opposition has been doing a little better on social networks lately and is trying to make up for the lack of television with a national frequency. And this advantage of the SNS is not so convincing that crowning a few percent would not be risky for them. If Mr. Vučić estimates that it is risky to go to the parliamentary elections in 2024, then I would not rule out the option of the government lasting the entire mandate. At this moment, it seems much more certain that the election will be held in 2024.

But not in Belgrade.?

That is already a difficult question, it is possible that they will be in Belgrade, along with the municipal ones. Although, I see that some analysts close to the SNS mention the Belgrade elections in the fall of 2023, so that could lead to the thought that they know something that we don't. However, I think that if there are parliamentary elections, they will be combined with provincial and local elections, and it seems very complicated that you are causing artificial crises in more than 100 local governments, in which regular elections follow, so that early elections can be held there as well. . From that angle, the parliamentary elections in the spring of 2024 seem much more realistic to me than in the fall of 2023.

SNS is constantly campaigning., but now he started again in that one "classic" campaign, where Aleksandar Vučić goes around Serbia, talk to the people, opens factories and roads, holds rallies... Didn't we see something similar in early 2019?. when did the campaign start "The future of Serbia"?

It seems to me that the campaign starts when the SNS assesses that there is a danger of losing votes. That campaign from 2019 was more a response to the protests of the opposition, a large number of citizens who took to the streets, and then SNS wanted to "cover" that topic with that campaign and show that there are more of them. This now acts as a response to the potential strengthening of the right as a consequence of accepting the Franco-German plan, so damage control is being done with a large number of rallies throughout Serbia where the president will show that he is powerful and enjoys a lot of support. But, in my opinion, this does not necessarily mean that it is a direct introduction to new elections, but rather the control of the damage that may come, because that damage has not yet occurred.

Is there a rise in the right wing??
There is a slight increase compared to 2022. year and united - and for the first time it seems that they could unite - they would have the potential to win perhaps even 20 percent of the vote.

Who is included in that group??

Dveri, Zavetnici, New DSS, POKS remnants of both, although there are few left of both.

A People's Party?

We never count the People's Party in the right wing.

Why when they have the same rhetoric and topics?

True, but voters do not perceive the People's Party as right-wing, probably because of who is at the top of that party. Voters see it more as an option that belongs to the civil opposition. It is true that they are trying to penetrate the right-wing electorate with these topics, especially in the last few months, but I am not sure how successful this strategy is, at least in the short term. That kind of repositioning requires time, and possibly a change in leadership. A leader who belongs to one block - that's how the citizens see him - cannot easily and without any problems change to a leader who represents another block. So, in the analyzes we do after public opinion surveys, we still classify the People's Party in the civic opposition.

What are voters being offered today? If we take into account the fact that there is a huge, dominant party that, in principle, cannot be placed on a purely ideological side, and there are also a large number of parties in the opposition that say more or less the same things on many topics as that largest party, what choice do they have citizens when it comes to some different policies - be it Kosovo, economy, ecology or anything else?

Citizens are offered a lot, even too much, and this, I think, is a key problem for the opposition. This leads to considerable confusion among the anti-regime population, which cannot clearly choose who to vote for. SNS and SPS are in the center, although they spread their tentacles to both the left and the right, which makes up a huge pool of votes of 55-60 percent. On the other hand, the right-wing went to the elections quite divided - if there was an old census of five percent, the question is which of them would have entered the Assembly in the first place. Now there is some kind of unification that the voters of the right are looking for because after the 2022 elections there is not much difference between the policies for which Dveri, Zavetnici, New DSS and POKS stand.

Before the 2022 elections, part of the voters of Dvera did not trust Milica Đurđević and Miloš Jovanović because it seemed quite clear to them that they somehow cooperate with the ruling parties, they have much more time on television with national frequencies than Boško Obradović, and on the other hand, Zavetnik voters and the New DSS were seen by Boško Obradović and Dveri as an option that came too close to the Alliance for Serbia and the civil opposition. We saw that mistrust in research then, but now it is gone. It seems to me that such a united option has some kind of synergistic effect and at this moment it represents the biggest problem for the SNS, because on that side there is a potential for the overflow of votes from the SNS to the right-wing opposition.

The key problem is in this second part of the opposition, which we could call "civic" - I can't call it the left, although there are also green-left options. There is also about 20 percent of the electorate that leans towards these more modernist options, and that electorate is not conservative. However, in that field we have 8-9 relevant political parties, plus some emerging movements, and they are all fighting for that twenty percent, so there is a problem there. A voter from that field is not completely sure after the 2022 election who he would vote for there - partly they go into apathy and the kind of anti-regime undecided voters. However, even if everyone is determined, when it is divided, it turns out that those parties can count on an average of 2-2,5 percent, of course, some have more and some less. It all seems rather unconvincing. In order to send the message that you are strong enough to threaten the ruling parties, you need to have at least a double-digit score to begin with. Because, when the elections are over, and 20 percent of the voters stand behind you, then you really represent a relevant political option, and in that case people can think that you can really win in the next elections.

These parties have two options: one is to make themselves the strongest option in that part of the ideological spectrum and win as many votes as possible. But no matter how hard they try, that result will end up being single digits. Another option is for them to see if it is somehow possible for the leadership's vanities to be put aside and not only to form coalitions that they form before the elections and then disintegrate, but to think about whether there is a possibility for the unification of those political parties into one, a return to the original Democratic Party. It seems like a reasonable option to me, but I don't see it happening because these games are as difficult as the first option.

When it comes to the census, unprovoked, the government lowered the electoral threshold to three percent, just before the 2020 elections. Therefore, in the middle of the game they changed the rules. Now it's mentioned again. - Milenko Jovanov does this., for example - that the census could return to five percent. What are they saying to the citizens?, and what about the opposition when they play with such serious things, tj. the way citizens elect their representatives?

In principle, election rules do not change in an election year. This is not only said by science, but also by organizations dealing with elections. When these rules are changed, then in normal countries a broad agreement is made that these changes will not be applied in the next election, but in the one after that. In our country, it would not be the first time that election rules are changed literally before the elections; and the Socialist Party of Serbia did this on several occasions during the nineties.

This could be SNS's trial balloon, but it could also be a bad assessment. At this point, I'm not sure that raising the census to 5 percent would help SNS too much. In that case, the parties on the right will almost certainly unite, and I even think that Saša Radulović's Enough is Enough would not go independently. All of them can think of three percent as a realistic result, and raising it to 5 percent would encourage and even force the parties on the civil spectrum to go to the elections together, because the risk of failure is much higher.

Therefore, the SNS would thereby do what it does not want and which does not support it, and the fragmented opposition supports it. Something similar to 2020 can happen: they then entered into the electoral system change guided by the idea of ​​getting the opposition parties out of the boycott, some of them did, but it backfired two years later when they made it easier for more newspapers to pass the electoral census . Now they can go in the other direction, and claim that the parliament is too fragmented, which it is - we have 15 parliamentary groups in the parliament, plus independent deputies, and SNS won almost half of the mandate. In a normal state, this is too much fragmentation. Increasing the census would unite the right within itself and civil options within itself. Thus, in the next elections, we would get 2-3 fairly relevant options, which collectively have 35-40 percent, which then seems much more threatening to SNS than if there were more options of 3, 4 or 10 percent.

Forwards, then they enter the Assembly, everyone creates their own parliamentary club and, with time, one by one, two or more MPs simply switch to SNS...

That's a different kind of problem. "Flying over" did happen before, but still not as pronounced as we think. Two years ago, my colleague Vujo Ilić did an analysis of the transition in the previous 30 years, and there were only a few dozen MPs in total, and even fewer who transitioned from the opposition to power.

It seems to me now that they have exhausted almost all resources and activated all the "sleepers" they had in the right part of the opposition. I don't know how many people have noticed, but, several times already, SNS represents the same people from Zavetnik and POKS who have transferred to SNS. Literally, only those few MPs and councilors - whom we knew immediately after the election to be close to the SNS - have been in the media for the last year, again due to the SNS's fear of the right-wing opposition. SNS presents those people as someone who realized that the right is seriously wrong and that the only future we should believe in is Mr. Vučić.

Most of the opposition boycotted the 2020 elections due to poor election conditions, and then, despite the same conditions, did not boycott the 2022 elections. Is there any reason to think about a new boycott in 2024??

The conditions are no better than in 2022, maybe a little better than they were in 2020. The opposition seems more prepared than in previous years. When we have parliamentary sessions - and we don't have them that often lately - it seems that the opposition looks more serious compared to the convocations before 2020, probably because a lot of opposition leaders are in the Assembly, and there are also a few younger people who handle it quite well the story. This is one of the reasons why there is no regular session of the National Assembly.

Zaista, why there is no session of the Assembly?

Because the opposition quite solidly uses the opportunity to remind about the affairs of the government, it opens the story about the rise in prices and the economy, and the economy is probably one of the foundations of the SNS's success in the elections. Also, they talk about Kosovo and that story is acceptable to a part of SNS voters. However, all of this is not regularly in the media because it would be a problem for SNS. If we talk about a boycott, it would be unrealistic and counterproductive. The one from 2020 was done quite badly, "in the background" - there was no serious campaign to boycott the election nor was it easy to implement, the pandemic started, there were a lot of closures, and in the end a large number of parties came out of the boycott and participated in the elections. Even after the 2020 election, there was no activity related to that boycott campaign.

I don't think anyone is thinking about it now, even if the electoral conditions are not improved. The parties have returned to budget financing, which is quite a serious matter for parties in Serbia, because here, financing from private sources, from natural and legal persons, practically does not exist. In addition, we have provincial and local elections coming up in 2024, where local committees that did not participate in the 2020 elections will try to enter those parliaments - in a large number of local governments we will have practically four years without any opposition.