Belgrade based daily Blic reports today that Serbia could have an early parliamentary election in the spring. Blic learns that the president of Serbia and the Serbian Progressive Party, Aleksandar Vucic, has talked with his associates and is getting closer to making such a decision.
According to daily’s interlocutor, Vucic talked with the leadership of the progressives late Sunday evening. He gathered people of trust and told them that he was ready to take on the decision on calling extraordinary parliamentary elections immediately after the local elections in Lučani on December 16th.
The same source told Blic that Vucic gave the order to the president of the SNS Executive Committee, Darko Glisic, to raise the party’s infrastructure for this purpose, i.e. ordered all party bodies to be ready for spring elections.
According to Blic’s source, majority of progressives at the meeting have supported the decision to call early elections.
– Several other meetings should be held, and the final decision will be made by the end of next week – says a source to the daily.
If all goes according to Vucic’s plans, it will be the fourth parliamentary election since 2012 since the SNS came to power.
Executive Director of CeSID Bojan Klacar told Blic that he believes that there are real chances that these elections will come, but that the decision is not even close to the end.
– Vucic and the SNS will call the elections or not, but will take into account the solution to the Kosovo problem and constitutional reforms. Chances are growing if there is a solution between Belgrade and Pristina in sight. The logical path is to go to the elections, and to resolve the status of Kosovo – says Klacar.
The government sent a draft of the constitutional amendments to the parliament, and as it is now coming to an end, Klacar says to Blic that it would not be a surprise that the constitutional referendum merges with an extraordinary election.
“The constitutional referendum itself is not attractive to the general public, and it would be an opportunity to merge it with the vote for the parliament,” he said.
Klacar believes that the SNS will take great care of the results of public opinion research. Also, the protests organized a few days ago represent a good action of opposition and the SNS will surely take care that some things do not get out of control.
– The progressives have a stable rating, and we will see if they will remain so after turbulence around Kosovo and if there is a more sensitive growth of SzS (Alliance for Serbia). If they see a change, they will not risk, but will announce elections – says Klacar.
He concludes that whether this will be an extraordinary election depends on the first place of the decision of Aleksandar Vucic but adds that there are objective chances for it.
– With the extraordinary parliamentary elections in spring, the opposition would not have enough time to organize itself – Bojan Klacar concludes for Blic.
Blic recall all parliamentary elections since the arrival of the SNS to the power: 6 May 2012, 16 March 2014, 24 April 2016, and possibly Spring 2019.
