Opposition Leaders: Authorities Not Showing Political Will to Accept Our Demands

Marinika Tepic (BETAPHOTO/AMIR HAMZAGIC)

Representatives of the Serbia Against Violence coalition assessed on Apr. 17, after talks about improving the electoral conditions with Assembly Speaker Ana Brnabic, that the authorities were not showing any political will to accept their demands, and announced that, on April 19, they would declare a decision on whether the coalition would run in the June 2 local elections in Belgrade.

The vice-president of the Freedom and Justice Party, Marinika Tepic, said after the meeting that “all have remained at the same positions.” “We offered a solution on April 16, in the form of a constitutional act that would establish a constitutional and legal frame for all local elections, including in Belgrade, to be postponed until autumn, because we have insisted from the start on the position ‘conditions first, elections later.’ Essentially, that is not a new proposal, but a solution that has been forced by all the previous rejections by Ana Brnabic of ways out of the political crisis,” Tepic told reporters in the Serbian parliament.

She dismissed as “untrue” the claims of the parliament speaker about the authorities having accommodated all the requests of the Serbia Against Violence coalition, except those about holding all the local elections together with the June 2 elections in Belgrade. “Ana Brnabic has not even accepted our first request, which is for work on the unified voter roster to be performed in committee format. We requested for this to be defined legally, and their proposal today (Apr. 17) was for it to be in the form of a parliamentary sub-committee with an unknown jurisdiction, mandate and scope of work,” Tepic stated.

The president of the People’s Movement of Serbia, Miroslav Aleksic, assessed after the meeting that a way out of the crisis existed, primarily through the implementation of key recommendations of ODIHR and moving the elections to autumn, but that there was no political will for this. “The authorities do not seem ready to make that sort of compromise. They are still trying to create a perception that they do serious work,” Aleksic stated.