Photo: Beta

Aleksandar Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party, SNS, has taken took control of the traditional bastion of the opposition Democratic Party, the northern Province of Vojvodina, as well as most municipalities and major cities.

Bojan Klacar, director of the Center for Free Elections and Democracy, CESID, told BIRN that the SNS was only a “relative winner” in last Sunday’s elections.

This is because it won less seats in parliament than it did in the last elections in 2014, but they compensated for that by winning more power at local level.

Parliamentary seats by parties: Parliament will still be dominated by the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, SNS, led by Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, which won 131 out of 250 seats in Sunday’s elections. The second-strongest force remains the Socialist Party of Serbia, which was the SNS’s junior partner in the last parliament, with 30 seats. Boosted by the recent acquittal of its leader Vojislav Seselj by the UN war crimes court in The Hague, the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party won 20 parliamentary seats. The pro-European “Dosta je bilo” (“Enough is Enough”) movement led by former economy minister Sasa Radulovic, who was made a minister by Vucic but resigned in 2014 due to the slow pace of economic reforms, won 16 seats. This is as many seats as the coalition gathered around the former ruling Democratic Party won. Meanwhile the pro-Russian coalition of the Democratic Party of Serbia, DSS, and Dveri also made it into parliament, where they will have 13 seats, the same number as the pro-European coalition led by former Serbian President Boris Tadic and made up of the Social Democratic Party, the Liberal Democratic Party and the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina.

“They got less seats on the national level, where seven lists crossed the [5-per-cent] threshold, but have much more power locally.

“The most important thing is they finally crushed the Democratic Party’s control over Vojvodina, which was one of the biggest election goals,” Klacar said.

In the provincial elections, the list “Aleksandar Vucic – Serbia wins” won 44.5 per cent of the votes and 63 of the 120 seats in the province’s assembly.

That is 50 seats more than the SNS won in the province in the previous elections held in 2012.

The Democratic Party, the long-time ruler of the Serbia’s agricultural heartland, won only 7.24 per cent of the votes and only 10 seats compared to the 58 they won in the 2012 provincial elections.

SNS officials from Vojvodina announced that they will most likely form a provincial government with the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians, SVM, which won 5 per cent of the votes and represents the province’s significant ethnic Hungarian community.

Bosko Jaksic, a political commentator, told BIRN that Vucic’s plan to put his own name on all the local election lists instead of his party’s had worked, taking advantage of the Serbs’ preference for leaders over parties.

“Vucic successfully persuaded people that even the local elections are about him, even if he will not be conducting any local business,” Jaksic said, adding that questions remain about who will run Vojvodina, since the SNS is thought to lack competent people in the province.

Nationally, the SNS won the majority votes in most of the 138 municipalities and 25 towns in Serbia.

The Progressives won a majority in Smederevska Palanka in central Serbia and Indjija and Apatin in Vojvodina where the Democrats previously held power.

The SNS also scored a huge leap in Cacak, winning 38 per cent of the votes in the town and breaking the 20-year old dominance of Velimir Ilic’s New Serbia party.

The Progressives won 14 out of 17 municipalities in Belgrade, only failing to take Vracar, Stari Grad and New Belgrade, the first two of which traditionally favour the old democratic parties.

In spite of a strong campaign, however, the SNS failed to take Jagodina, in central Serbia, Surdulica and Bosilegrad in southeast Serbia or Cajetina in southwest Serbia, where local chiefs from different parties managed to win a majority of votes.

In Vranje, in southern Serbia, elections will be repeated at two polling stations after police charged two persons with violating the electoral process and giving and receiving bribes.

In Nis, in south-central Serbia, elections will be repeated at 20 polling stations because it was discovered there were more ballots than actual voters there.