The Serbian leader is strengthening his grip on power during the general elections, according to the first results
President Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia’s strong leader and Russia’s closest ally in Europe, consolidated his decade-long grip on power on Sunday with what preliminary results indicated was a major victory for his ruling party in an early general election.
Like everything previous elections in the deeply polarized Balkan country, Sunday’s poll was marred by reports of voting irregularities and complaints that Mr. Vucic stranglehold on much of the Serbian media and over a large state sector with hundreds of thousands of voters, had once again given his party an unfair advantage.
Speaking late on Sunday at his party’s headquarters in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, the president declared himself “extremely happy” with what he described as “absolute victory.”
Partial official results and an exit poll from polling agency IPSOS and the Center for Free Elections, an independent Serbian monitoring group, showed a large majority in Parliament for Mr Vucic’s nationalist ruling party, the Serbian Progressive Party, and its allies.
Mr Vucic’s party, which renamed itself Serbia Must Not Stop before the election, appears to have won a total of twice as many votes as its main rival, an alliance of several opposition groups called Serbia Against Violence. Seats in Parliament are distributed according to a complex proportional system and the exact composition of the legislature will not be clear in the coming days.
The opposition had hoped to respond to a wave of public disgust consecutive mass shootings in May But shut out by national television channels and pilloried by incendiary pro-government tabloids, he was unable to channel the energy of the summer’s huge street protests against violence into a successful electoral challenge.
For a time during the summer, it seemed that Mr. Vucic, abandoned by some of his allies and under increasing pressure from the street, could lose its grip. But his party once again proved to be a formidable political machine capable of mobilizing voters, including some, according to election observers, who had no right to vote where they cast their ballots.
The Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability, an opposition-oriented pro-democracy organization, reported “a large number of cases” of voters being bused to Belgrade from other parts of Serbia and from neighboring Kosovo and Bosnia, where large ethnic groups live. Serbs who tend to have strong nationalistic leanings.
Opposition parties appeared to have performed better in Belgrade’s municipal elections, but it was unclear whether the city, Serbia’s largest and most important power center, would fall under the control of Vucic’s mostly pro-Western liberal and centrist opponents. .
Mr Vucic declared victory in Belgrade, but opposition leader Marinika Tepic vowed to contest the results there, saying “we will use all democratic means to defend the will of all citizens of Serbia.” Control over capital is seen as a particularly important prize, as it was controversial elections in the city in 1996 That galvanized opposition to Slobodan Milosevic, then Serbia’s leader, and helped galvanize forces that led to his downfall in 2000.
Serbia, the most populous country to emerge from the ruins of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s following the wars unleashed by Mr Milosevic, has fewer than seven million inhabitants but has attracted the attention of the United States and the European Union as the revolves around which of the many problems in the volatile region, including: regular outbreaks of violence in mainly ethnic Serb areas of Kosovoturn.
But Mr. Vucic has so far dashed hopes in Washington and Brussels that Serbia would move toward recognizing the de facto, if not legal, independence of Kosovo, a former Serbian territory that declared itself an independent state in 2008 proclaimed. In the West, Mr. Vucic has resisted pressure to turn away from Russia, Serbia’s traditional ally and protector, and accelerate his long-stalled and often half-hearted efforts to join the European Union.
Serbia refused to join Western sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine, and the country has a sometimes violent ultranationalist community committed to the 1990s cause of a “Greater Serbia,” a Serbian version of the the Kremlin’s irredentist claims to Ukraine and other former Soviet territories that Moscow considers part of the ‘Russian world’.
The outcome of Sunday’s election could theoretically give Mr Vucic more leeway to strike a peace deal with Kosovo and break with Russia, especially as the far-right nationalist party Vojislav Seselj, a convicted war criminal, failed to win any seats.
Mr Vucic, a wartime protégé of Mr Seslj, called early elections in a bid to reassert his authority, badly damaged by the anti-violence protests. While he has faced no serious challenge from enemies or estranged former allies, he has shown little inclination to abandon his long-standing tactic of maneuvering between East and West and avoiding moves toward Kosovo that would provoke a backlash from hardline nationalists risk.
The results dashed Vucic’s opponents’ hopes of a return to power after more than a decade on the sidelines. In a rare show of unity, Serbia’s usually fragmented and warring opposition groups mostly united to form a united front. But there were still nearly two dozen different groups on the ballot.
Unable to compete with Mr. Vucic’s entrenched national support network and his sycophantic media machine, the opposition has struggled to convert public anger over gun violence and links between the government and organized crime in the political momentum needed to break an increasingly authoritarian system.
Alisa Dogramadzieva reporting contributed.