Why Everyone Lost Out in Serbia’s Elections

Aleksandar Vucic speech to the parliament in Belgrade, Serbia, 2016. Photo: EPA/KOCA SULEJMANOVIC

The remaining 16 seats are held by ethnic minority parties, which enter under a lower threshold. The only real opposition in Serbia's new parliament are two Albanian MPs from the mainly ethnic Albanian municipalities of Bujanovac and Presevo; the minority parties all cooperated with the previous Progressive Party-led governments.

But his resounding victory also makes the outcome a defeat for Vucic. A parliament without an opposition cannot serve as a figleaf to legitimize the supposedly democratic rule of the president.

Had more of the 21 competing parties and groups entered parliament, such as the various far-right and fascist groups, or a few scattered democrats, the Progressive Party, SNS, could claim that Serbia had a pluralistic parliament. Now it cannot, which thus reveals the authoritarian nature of the regime.

But the opposition lost as well. While the turnout was probably lower than the official numbers, according to the independent monitoring NGO CRTA it was around 48 per cent, or about 8 to 9 per cent lower than previous parliamentary elections in 2016.

This minor drop cannot be attributed solely to the opposition boycott. It was also a result of COVID-19 and voter apathy. Clearly, the main effort of the regime was to push up voter participation, as most of the irregularities that CRTA noted focused on pushing up voter numbers and SNS officials appear to have called potential voters on election day to pressure them to vote.

The boycotting opposition succeeded in delegitimizing the opposition that participated, like the Movement of Free Citizens, headed by Sergej Trifunovic, which only gained 1.5 per cent of the vote,...