A near-complete official vote count of Serbia’s presidential election has confirmed that Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic has won by a landslide in the first round of voting.
The Serbian State Election Commission after counting 91 percent of ballots yesterday said that Vucic won 55 percent of votes, followed by liberal candidate Sasa Jankovic with 16 percent, and Luka Maksimovic, a parody politician, with 9 percent.
The triumph at Sunday’s election presents a major boost for Vucic, who is expected to further tighten his grip on power.
A former extreme nationalist who has rebranded himself as pro-EU reformer, Vucic has said he wants to lead the Balkan country into the EU, while pushing for deeper ties to long-time ally Russia.
While Serbia is a parliamentary republic, and the presidency is intended as a largely symbolic position, the actual effect of the election result is seen as removing the last check on Vucic’s power and as a further erosion of Serbia’s nascent democratic institutions.
Vucic, by far the most popular political leader in the country, is to choose his successor as prime minister, most likely a pliant one, and he is expected to exercise unchallenged control over all of the country’s main political institutions: Parliament, the executive branch, the ruling party and the presidency.
With its coalition partners, his party has a strong and solid majority in the Serbian Parliament, and the courts are weak and seen as politically controlled.
Departing Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic had been one of the few checks on Vucic’s power.
Declaring victory in the capital, Belgrade, Vucic said: “When you have results like this, it’s clear to everyone that there is no instability... Serbia is strong, Serbia is powerful and it will be even stronger.”
As Western governments decrease their involvement in the Balkans and membership in the EU loses its appeal to Serbia and other countries, political leaders in the region are feeling less pressure to govern within the confines of democratic institutions or to protect human rights, press freedom and the rule of law, and to fight corruption.
The regional trend is toward “weak democracies with autocratically minded leaders, who govern through informal patronage networks and claim to provide pro-Western stability in the region,” according to a study by the Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group.
Observers view Vucic’s consolidation of power as a product of this drive for stability that has shaped the politics of the western Balkans over the past decade, as Western governments choose to engage with strong leaders rather than work to strengthen democratic institutions.
“Stability trumps everything,” said Jelena Milic, director of the liberal Center for Euro-Atlantic Studies in Belgrade.
Public opinion surveys before the election showed that Serbian voters considered Vucic the best candidate for delivering stability, Ipsos pollster Srdjan Bogosavljevic said in Belgrade.
Living in a region still inflamed by ethnic tensions and economic turbulence, in which older people experienced three wars in a generation, Serbs want a strong leader to guide the country, Bogosavljevic said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion