Opposition Leader: It’s Impossible to Participate in Phoney Elections, Phantom Voters Are Still Being Moved to Capital

Marinika Tepic

Freedom and Justice Party vice president Marinika Tepic said on March 28 that no progress has been made regarding the ODIHR’s recommendations for Serbia’s election process, adding that “it is impossible to participate in elections that are not elections.”

“The moving of phantom voters has intensified, whereby people are changing their residences from other addresses to Belgrade so that they can vote there, while continuing to live at their original location. Not only has nothing changed on that front but [Serbian President] Aleksandar Vucic and [his ruling] Serbian Progressive Party, having recognized that they are unwanted in Belgrade and [other] big cities, have undertaken monstrous engineering: they are changing the people themselves,” Tepic told the NIN weekly.

Tepic stated that she and her party have asked the Cabinet and Parliament to begin discussing how the new elections will be implemented in Belgrade and dozens of other municipalities and cities throughout the country, so as to effect at least the minimum changes necessary to make the elections “real.”
 
Asked how much time they will have for this if the dialogue has yet to begin and the results are needed immediately, Tepic said she was pessimistic regarding the deadlines.

“I’m pessimistic in that – if [the regime] continues to say that the realistic date for the elections is June 2, or July, August, it doesn’t matter – that the Serbia Against Violence coalition will run in those elections if nothing changes. We’re not strategizing with the dates, not asking for a later date because we suddenly feel the whim to take it easy and rest – as Aleksandar Vucic has sarcastically claimed. It is tragic how he treats half of the citizens of the country he is leading,” Tepic stated.

According to her, the exact date of the upcoming elections is irrelevant. What matters, she said, is a bare minimum of changes to the electoral process, i.e. the opening up of the RTS public broadcaster and cleansing of the electoral roll. This, Tepic insisted, will determine when the opposition will enter the elections.