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Students have won early political elections in Serbia. And throughout the country, live on TV, the celebration exploded in the streets. According to the results which are still provisional but which are unlikely to change substantially, they obtained 52% of the votes, which would confer 138 of the 250 seats in the national Parliament against the 39% obtained by the United Serbia list of former president Aleksandar Vučić, which would thus have 104 seats. No other coalition in the running, according to projections, has passed the 3% threshold, except the small ethnic minority parties, which are not subject to it.
In a surprise move, Vucic himself was the first to appear live on RTS TV to announce that he had “lost the elections”, after his announced live appearance had raised fears that he intended to announce his victory instead. Vucic, with a sad but composed expression, said that the students conducted an “incorrect and full of lies” electoral campaign and that he would not make any concessions to the opposition, but recognized “the students’ victory”.
Representing the latter, candidate Radomir said on RTS that «Serbia has finally taken its destiny into its own hands, with a result that rewards almost two years of struggle». The first on the student list, the cardiologist Ilija Srđanović, specified that his country has “turned the face of a tyrant: Let’s move towards a better Serbia”.
The students were rewarded with a record turnout, which was close to 70%, a figure that had not been seen for at least 30 years and that commentators had been predicting for some time, claiming that it would favor the students. The party exploded while, with the polls already closed, a climate of tension was growing in the center of Belgrade, with large police deployments and the feared presence of provocateurs.
It was an election that the former president, who resigned in September to take up the student challenge at the head of the United Serbia list, felt he could lose. Betraying nervousness with statements in recent months, in which he insisted on defining the students as “destroyers” and “unreliable”, “maneuvered by foreign powers” who are enemies of Serbia.
The queues at the polls were very long well before they opened at 7am. The students advised their voters to vote early, while tension immediately appeared high, palpable even in the streets, linked to the fear that fraud, irregularities and manipulation could invalidate an electoral test that Europe, America and even Russia are watching.
The predictions on the eve of the election, depending on the orientation of the pollsters, alternately put United Serbia ahead or the Student List, which meticulously prepared for the electoral test also by training over 16 thousand list representatives and 60 thousand inspectors outside the polling stations, who supported the over 16 thousand international and national observers present in the area, including delegations from the OSCE, the Odihr, the Council of Europe and the European Parliament.
Exit polls are not allowed in Serbia. The first projections many hours after the closing of the polls provided by some of the associations and opinion polling institutes that follow the vote, such as CeSid/Ipsos Serbia and Crta, before the National Election Commission (Rik) gives the first concrete results, when the data from the polls begin to flow to its data collection centers, joining the potential votes of the approximately 100 thousand Serbs who vote abroad and the hundreds of potential votes of Bosnian Serbs residing in the Bosnia and Herzegovina who have received dual citizenship.
There were 18 lists competing for the 250 seats in the Serbian unicameral parliament, elected with a single-constituency proportional system and a threshold of 3%.