Who Leads the Student List Is the Real Question
The fight over who tops the list and the 46 to 29 arithmetic matter more than any talk of an election date, because they decide whether the opposition runs as one.
- The fight over who tops the list, Djokic against Lompar, became the weekend's main nerve.
- Faktor plus in May puts the SNS above 46 percent and the student list below 29.
- The 46 to 29 gap only flips on very high turnout, not on its own.
- The list becomes final only once elections are called, so it is built into a void.
In a bank queue a few days ago, two men ahead of me argued about who should top the student list. Not about when the election would be. About a name. That dispute has slid so far off the television and into ordinary talk that people now hold it while waiting to pay an electricity bill.
That tells you a great deal. After the mass rally on Slavija on May 23, where the Archive of Public Gatherings estimated more than 100,000 people while police director Dragan Vasiljevic cited 34,300, the central nerve did not become the voting date. It became the question of who leads the list, and whether that list can even be assembled before elections are formally called.
Why does the leader matter more than the date?
Because the date is the government’s to set, while the leader is the opposition’s to choose, and only one of those levers is in its hands. Aleksandar Vucic has already floated a choice, July 12 or the autumn, and announced a rally around Vidovdan on June 27. Timing is his lever. The other side holds only one lever that counts, the ability to show up as a single bloc.
The clash between Vladan Djokic and Milo Lompar is therefore not a technicality. Rector Djokic insists he does not do politics, even as names like Dejan Bodiroga, Dejan Soskic and Nemanja Vidic circulate around him. Each of those names carries a different audience. Choosing the leader is, in truth, choosing which Serbia the list invites to vote.
Can a list be built while there is still no election?
Formally, not entirely. The list becomes final only once elections are called, so every present quarrel over first place looks like splitting the bear’s skin while the bear is still in the forest. Politically, though, yes, because an audience is built over months, not on the day the electoral commission opens the window.
Then comes the cold arithmetic. Faktor plus in May gives the SNS above 46 percent and the student list below 29. That gap is not erased by a speech from a stage. It is erased in one way only, through turnout high enough to change the composition of the electorate itself.
Analyst Dragomir Andjelkovic, writing in Vreme, says aloud what the camps prefer to keep quiet:
What spoils Vucic’s luck is the fact that he is aware he has drastically lost the support of the majority of Serbia.
If that is true, every day spent fighting over the leader is a gift to the rival. The 46 to 29 math does not wait for the opposition to agree. It works on its own, in favor of whoever has time.
There is a counter-argument I have to make myself. Perhaps the fight over the leader is not wasted time but the painful birth of a list with genuine coalition credibility. A list thrown together around one name imposed from above would crack in the first week of the campaign. By that logic, quarreling now is cheaper than collapsing later.
Back to the two men in the queue. They did not argue about the date, because the date arrives from outside, like the weather. They argued about a name, because the name is the only thing they choose themselves. And maybe that is the real measure of this moment, not when the vote happens, but whether by then there is someone worth turning out for.
So which matters more to you, when the election comes or who stands at the top of the list?
