Democrats’ Leader: False Promises Jeopardize Vucic’s Stay in Power

Zoran Lutovac (BETAPHOTO/MILAN OBRADOVIC/MO)

Democratic Party leader Zoran Lutovac on April 6 said that the Serbian Progressive Party and Aleksandar Vucic had failed to fulfill almost all of the promises given over the past nine years.

Lutovac told BETA that the Progressives had assumed power by securing votes of the citizens based on their nationalist rhetoric and the promise to fully change the behavior pattern applied in the previous period.

Asked about the key promises which the regime had failed to fulfill, Lutovac said that it was the Progressives’ promise to discontinue the bad practices of the previous regime and to do everything differently.

“It has not happened. Bad practices have not been abandoned and have been further improved – from the biggest anomalies, through employment based on political affiliation which has become a general rule, all to the tiniest anomalies which are justified with the fact that ‘it was the same during the previous regime,” which should have been eliminated as promised in election campaigns,” Lutovac specified.

Asked how Vucic had been managing to retain power despite the fact that most of the promises had not been kept , Lutovac replied that the key was in his control of media outlets, usurped state and public institutions and tacit and even open support Vucic had been receiving from abroad on the back of “false promises” that he would recognize “Kosovo as an independent state.”