CRTA: Threshold Lowering Means Changing Election System, Not Election Conditions

Rasa Nedeljkov (Beta/Media center)

Program director of the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA) NGO Rasa Nedeljkov said on Feb. 4 that the decision to lower the threshold for entry into the parliament from five to three percent of the voters who turn out was "a political decision made by one man or a small group of people without prior debate or consensus."

As a guest on an N1 TV show, Nedeljkov said that it was "problematic that in a society that wants to present itself as democratic one of the essential things in the election system is being changed like that." He further said that "there is a difference between election conditions and election systems," adding that "lowering the election threshold falls under election system change, while almost nothing has been done to change the election conditions," which have been the subject of a dialogue with representative of the opposition and civil society over the last few months.

"If the rules of the game change, and you're changing [them] a month before an election, that could mean that you may have already had that plan a year ago," said Nedeljkov. He went on to say that this was precisely why the Venice Commission and the OSCE criticized the countries that wanted to call themselves democratic, urging them to refrain from changing the election conditions "unless there is a consensus of the actors, which does not exist (in Serbia)."