Elections, either regular or extraordinary would most certainly take place in Serbia, prior to the final resolution of the Kosovo issue, Belgrade-based daily Danas reports.
Bojan Klacar, researcher at the Center for Free Elections and Democracy (CeSID) made these remarks to Danas, responding to a question if more frequent appearances of the Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) members on the most viewed television stations, in addition to their presence in these media, could indicate holding of extraordinary elections.
“It is no secret that television stations with national coverage are the most powerful tool to reach out to the constituencies. Even more, because opposition is on the margins there. It is also noticeable, that President Vucic has almost no identical speeches and messages in all the media. So, we have one speech on RTS (Serbian national broadcaster), another one on TV Pink, the third one on TV Happy and so on,” Klacar noted.
He also added, the latest surveys show the rating of Aleksandar Vucic is above 50 percent and there are no significant novelties in that. However, the novelty is a decline of his Progressive Party (SNS) rating. However, this case is peculiar as well, as the circumstances that led to that fall would impact some other party up to 10 percent or more, while in the case of SNS it is only about few percentages, almost insignificant. The circumstances that lead to this decline are the death of workers on construction sites, an accident in a gorge, and of course the Kosovo knot.
According to Klacar, Vucic has noticed that and started to communicate on some other topics, “in order to divert attention from these unfortunate issues.”
“Soon after we had his visits to Beijing and Moscow, and for another part of his constituency we had a retirement of the Serbian Army Chief-of-Staff General Ljubisa Dikovic. Therefore, Vucic uses TV stations to control the political agenda. They would also take into account what public surveys talk about Kosovo and based on that they would build their positions. However, it is almost certain they would go for elections before the final solution, not afterwards,” Klacar concluded.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Pejic from Faktor Plus agency, also believes elections would take place prior to the final resolution of the Kosovo issue, but according to him that solution won’t happen before 2020, when the deadline for regular elections is, Danas daily reported.
