Why is Vucic waiting until the last days to call elections for 17 December?

The elections are announced for 17 December, and there is much talk and agreement among opposition, but there is no official announcement yet.

The deadline for parliamentary elections is 2 November, Raša Nedeljković, programme director of “Crta”, told Danas.

The President of Serbia announced in a interview on TV Prva that he would call elections “on Wednesday or Thursday”, recalling that parliamentary, Belgrade, local and provincial elections are also announced.

If the President of Serbia does call elections on Thursday, it will mean that he has waited until the last day to call them.

We asked him why the President is waiting until the last days to call the elections when it was announced weeks ago that they would be held on 17 December.

Nedeljkov says that the reasons lie in the use of power and the advantage that the government has over other actors to dictate all the conditions and circumstances when, under which and according to what rules elections will be held.

“In the concrete case, we see how the party in power has subordinated the public interest exclusively to itself – creating uncertainty for all actors (media, citizens, opposition parties, observers) except for the parties in power, and thus further creating an advantage for them”, says Nedeljkov.

Crta’s Programme Director states that the reasons for this behaviour of the authorities can also be found in the fact that Serbia has spent a total of two years, three months and four days, i.e. 842 days, in the last 11 years, between the calling of the national elections and the formation of the government.

The last sitting of this Assembly was last week, and it is now expected to be formally dissolved by the President of the Assembly, Vladimir Orlić.

As a reminder, the Mayor of Belgrade, Aleksandar Šapić, has already submitted his resignation. Including Belgrade, according to currently known data, in 66 local governments, mayors and presidents of municipalities have submitted their resignations to allow elections to be called.

Although provincial elections have been announced, there is still no resignation of the President of the government of Vojvodina, Igor Mirovic, also from the Serbian Progressive Party.

At the end of September, the day after the mass resignations of municipal presidents and mayors, he said that he did not intend to resign, and then the President of the Republic called elections in this province.

The date of the elections and their call had been speculated for months, but by calling them for December, Vucic has met the demand of the pro-European opposition, gathered around the protest organisation Serbia Against Violence, to call and hold them at the end of this year.

All electoral deadlines are stipulated by the Constitution and the law./Danas/