Members of “Serbia Against Violence” announcing the signing of the coalition agreement in November 2023
Photo: FoNet
BELGRADE – Following the elections on 17 December, members of the “Serbia Against Violence” coalition have requested the annulment of the results due to numerous indications of serious irregularities. The request has been followed by the calls from some members of the coalition, as well as parts of the public, for the MPs to resign and show they do not accept the results, which has since become a controversial issue.
“Serbia Against Violence” won 23.66% of the vote and 65 out of 250 seats in the parliament and 34.63% and 43 out of 110 seats in the Belgrade City Assembly.
Shortly after the election, the candidate of the coalition for the mayor of Belgrade, Vladimir Obradović, said that he could not accept his seat as a councilor, because the elections were, as he said, stolen.
Subsequently, Dragan Đilas and Zdravko Ponoš, leaders of two of the parties in the “Serbia Against Violence”, agreed in a joint appearance on N1 that the coalition should not take seats in Belgrade, while the situation in national parliament should be discussed further.
This apparent inconsistency was criticised by a part of the public and added fuel to the discussion on whether opposition should resign from the national parliament as well.
There is no final decision on this issue and multiple MPs have argued against the proposal. They point out that, in this case, the vacancies would be filled by the ruling parties, while the members of the “Serbia Against Violence” would be left without financial and other resources that the parliamentary status brings.
The proposed move is often described in the public as “not taking” the seats. Technically, mandates are confirmed almost automatically and the only thing that opposition MPs can do is resign afterwards.
In his appearance on N1 television on 8 January, co-president of the “Together” party Nebojša Zelenović supported the idea of not accepting the seats and “delegitimising” the parliament.
“I think this would lead to new elections within six months. Accepting the mandates would lead to four years of them (the ruling parties) offering talks, negotiations, agreements, without an intention to establish a normal society and normal elections”, Zelenović said.
The calls for the opposition to relinquish the seats have been loud on X (formerly Twitter), and have also come from members of the opposition lists which did not cross the 3% threshold. One of them was Ivana Parlić, an MP in the previous parliament, who wrote that, by accepting the seats, the opposition would “legalise the electoral fraud and cement Vučić’s power for 4 years”.
Meanwhile, Biljana Đorđević, MP from the Green-Left Front party (also a member of the “Serbia Against Violence” coalition), pointed out for Nova S television on 9 January that MPs resigning would mean that the vacant seats would be allocated to the remaining parties proportionally to their results.
“Accepting the seats does not mean that you are accepting what the government is doing, it does not mean that you are a loyal opposition, that you are co-opted. You can show your disagreement in many other ways”, Đorđević said.
In an op-ed released by Vreme, professor at the Belgrade Faculty of Law and member of the Green-Left Front legal team Svetislav Kostić further argued that resigning from the parliament would represent a “self-castration” of the opposition.
He said that opposition’s presence in the parliament from 2022 to 2023 enabled it to develop infrastructure and “catch” the ruling parties’ electoral irregularities.
Majority of the opposition in Serbia boycotted the 2020 parliamentary election, leaving the National Assembly almost entirely without opposition MPs (only 6 out of 250 MPs did not support the government).
This has led to an announcement of snap election in 2022 and an EU-mediated dialogue on the improvement of electoral conditions. The process did not manage to resolve the major issues of the electoral process – pressure on voters, media imbalance and abuse of public offices, which were again recorded in the 2022 ODIHR report.
Previously, large parts of the opposition boycotted parliamentary sessions in 2019 and early 2020.
