Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic led his party to a landslide victory in general elections boycotted by the opposition, securing a crushing majority in a country that is at the center of a struggle for influence among global powers.
Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party won 61.2 percent of Sunday’s vote, according to partial official results with 68 percent of polling stations counted.
Boosted by the boycott from opposition leaders and turnout marred by fear of COVID-19, the result is enough for his party to change any law uncontested. It also eclipses the majorities held by ruling parties across Europe save those of Russia and Belarus.
Photo: AFP
“This is a historic moment,” Vucic said after declaring victory. “Tonight we got enormous confidence from the people, the most ever in Serbia.”
The win would allow him to tighten his political dominance over the former Yugoslav republic that began when he transformed himself from nationalist firebrand to a pro-EU prime minister in 2014.
It also renews the government’s mandate to tackle thorny issues ranging from trying to lead the economy into a post-virus recovery to mending ties with Kosovo and navigating the uncertain path toward EU membership.
In second place behind the Progressives was the Socialist Party of Vucic’s foreign minister, Ivica Dacic, with 10.4 percent.
According to a parallel tally of election officials’ partial vote count, independent monitors at the CeSID think tank said only one other party made it in to parliament and turnout was about 48 percent.
Buoyed by state media coverage of his government’s efforts to quash Serbia’s COVID-19 outbreak and engagements with leaders in the US, China and Russia, Vucic overcame weeks of protests against his government by tens of thousands of Serbs who took to their balconies during the virus lockdown.
His victory exceeds the most votes won by the late wartime strongman Slobodan Milosevic, a former boss to Vucic in the 1990s. The biggest opposition parties refused to field candidates, saying the Progressives denied them access to media and undermined conditions for a free-and-fair vote.
“This result is an election tsunami,” said Slobodan Zecevic, an analyst at the Institute of European Studies. “I don’t know anyone in Europe capable of such an election result.”
Since switching to the job of president in 2017, Vucic has transformed the role from a largely ceremonial post into Serbia’s main executive position.
During that time he has reined in public finances, attracted foreign investment and raised wages.
Still, living standards have languished virtually unchanged at about two-fifths of the EU average for the past decade, and Freedom House, a largely US-government funded think tank that monitors democracy, ranks Serbia as only “partly free.”
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