Serbia is heading to the polls, again. On Sunday, the country will vote to elect a new national parliament and several local assemblies, including in the hotly-contested capital Belgrade.
This is the seventh time President Aleksandar Vučić has taken his country to the polls since he was first elected in 2012, and the fourth consecutive time he has called elections early. Vučić has developed a habit of holding elections every two years, and he has honed his techniques for winning. With his Serbian Progressive party (SNS) set to win again, what’s his secret?
As elsewhere in the Balkans, Serbia’s rulers depend on a political patronage system to maintain power. The public administration is bloated for good reason: it allows the ruling party to give out jobs in return for political loyalty. Since the SNS came to power in 2012, those who work in the public sector have been pressured to vote for the ruling party and their families and friends are expected to do the same. Those who disobey risk being transferred or dismissed from their jobs.
In the first 20 days of the campaign, the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA) recorded claims of clientelism in 12 cities, primarily directed at public sector employees. The online news portal Balkan Insight reported that one employee working in local government in Kragujevac was transferred to an abandoned, damp workplace after he refused to promise to secure votes for the SNS.
Those who have jobs in the public sector are expected not only to vote for the ruling party, but to campaign for them too. Recently, Serbia’s opposition Freedom and Justice party complained that teachers in the town of Užice were forced to go door-to-door campaigning for the SNS.
Vučić and the SNS also benefit from Serbia’s stuffed electoral register. Last week, Serbs received their voting notices. I received voting slips for my grandmother, my dead father, and my sister, who isn’t a Serbian citizen and who was a toddler when she left the country more than 30 years ago to return to the UK.
I’m not the only person to discover phantoms in my letter box. There have been several reports, mainly from residents in Belgrade, of households receiving voting slips for people they have never heard of, or who died long ago. This inflation of the electoral register may be down to neglect, or perhaps political opportunism. But the SNS shows no sign of sorting out the register anytime soon. For now, the dead can vote with no questions asked.
The SNS also assiduously courts its base among the living. Pensioners, who reliably turn out for the polls and tend to vote for the ruling party, are the recipients of pre-election largesse in the form of pension top-ups and food bags. Friends tell me about pensioners in their buildings receiving goody bags from the SNS containing coffee, honey and probiotics.
Pensioners across Serbia have also received a love letter from the president, reminding them, in case they had forgotten, that the government will be increasing their pensions and sending them a one-time payment of 20,000 dinars (around 170 euros) to help with rising prices. A high-ranking SNS official and acting director of the Serbian post, Zoran Đorđević, admitted that the SNS has mailed 1.7 million of these letters, costing more than 330,000 euros. An investigation has been launched into how the SNS obtained these pensioners’ personal data.
The SNS is not above cold-calling potential voters either. In the run-up to election day, several of my friends received calls from people claiming to represent the SNS, asking if they would be supporting the party on election day. Some businesses even received calls asking if they would like minor improvements to their buildings. The implication of these offers is obvious.
It’s not clear how the SNS obtained these phone numbers. Independent election observers belonging to the CRTA have reported on the illegal collection and misuse of citizens’ personal data. In several places, they allege, the SNS has been conducting political polling by telephone, suggesting that the ruling party may have illegally acquired personal data from Serbian telephone providers.
Even if the SNS doesn’t have your number, it’s still impossible to hide from Mr Vučić. At least one poster of the president is visible on every main street and roundabout in Belgrade. He’s also on TV constantly. According to CRTA, in the first ten months of 2023, Vučić appeared 248 times in national broadcasts, almost every day. Older voters in Serbia still tend to get most of their news on TV. Younger voters encounter Mr Vučić on social media, including on TikTok where he prepares crepes and recommends quality wines.
That the ruling party is prepared to go to such lengths suggests that it is not completely confident of winning this election, certainly not in the capital, which has traditionally been a bastion of the liberal opposition.
The SNS dominates Serbia’s institutions, its political patronage system, and its media. But in a country where democracy is diminished but still exists, there is always a danger that if you go too far you will provoke a post-election backlash. The tactics used by the ruling party in the 2017 presidential election were very similar to those being deployed today, and they led to widespread protests after the results were announced.
Despite the appearance of stability after a dozen years of SNS rule, Serbia’s polity is polarised and brittle. There have been several months of street protests after two mass shootings in May 2023, with the opposition accusing the SNS and the pro-SNS media of creating a culture of hatred and violence. The liberal opposition parties have formed a pre-electoral coalition under the banner Serbia Against Violence, with about 34 per cent support. Despite the ruling party’s grubby electioneering, or perhaps because of it, the opposition will be hoping to loosen the SNS’s stranglehold on power this weekend.
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