Vucic about Elections in Belgrade: It’s on the Edge now, Result to Depend on Right-Wing Parties

Belgrade, panorama (BETAPHOTO/MILOS MISKOV)

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, a member of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, said on Nov. 27 that the party’s surveys showed that the ratio between voter support to ruling parties and to the opposition was “on the edge, and that the composition of the next government would depend on who would cross the electoral threshold.

“It’s on the edge right now. We need to see what happens with these right-wing parties, and who will join the city parliament, and who won’t,” Vucic said. According to the president, the things in Belgrade “have changed considerably,” and the list of Progressive candidates had been ahead of the “Serbia against Violence” slate since a month ago.

Quoting the said survey, Vucic said that voter support to all the tickets for Serbian parliamentary elections, including the Socialist Party of Serbia’s, “were 3.5 or four percent below voter support to the Serbian Progressives and the Alliance of Vojvodina’s Hungarians.” “If they manage to change the ratio in the next 20 days, they would be one or two percent ahead, and the Progressives and the Alliance would be on the edge, as to whether we were able to create a new government, or not,” Vucic said.

The Serbian president dismissed allegations that he was using his presidency for the purposes of the coming polls, explaining that he was “only doing his job” – that of the president of all citizens. He said that amendments to a set of election laws that prevented office holders from using their posts for the purposes of elections applied to candidates running for office, and that he wasn’t one.

Vucic announced that by the end of the election campaign he would travel abroad “for at least two or three days.” “It means that I’ll be in the country for another seven or eight days, and I plan to use them to help the list of candidates “Serbia Must Not Stop” as much as I can,” Vucic said.