Three Columns Against Power: Serbia's Opposition Splits

As St. Vitus Day approaches, the assessment is hardening that Serbia’s opposition bloc will go into elections divided. By accounts from the corridors of politics, the blockading students and the parliamentary opposition still have no agreement on a joint list, and the likelier scenario is three separate columns. The first is the student list, the second is the pro-European opposition gathered around the EU5 grouping, and the third is parties of the right and national orientation running as a distinct pole.

Opinion polls consistently show that, were elections held today, the student list would win more than any other opposition option. In the April Faktor plus poll the student list stands at around 28.7 percent, comfortably ahead of the other opposition lists. The governing Serbian Progressive Party still leads in the same survey, with about 46.4 percent. The numbers are plain: the opposition has real capacity, but spends it on internal division.

Why won’t the students and the opposition run together?

For a year and a half the students have built their legitimacy precisely on distance from party politics. Their recognizability rests on the message that they are no party’s extended hand, so they fear that merging too quickly with opposition actors would erode that standing. Hence the caution toward any arrangement that would place them, even symbolically, back inside the old political pattern.

On the other side, the pro-European opposition around the EU5 grouping and the parties of the right have different voter bases, different foreign-policy priorities and programs that are hard to reconcile. New DSS leader Milos Jovanovic openly argues for a run in three columns, saying each column has an audience that a single joint list could not cover. In that logic, three lists are not a weakness but a way to mobilize a broader spectrum of dissatisfied voters.

The arithmetic, however, has another side. The electoral threshold is a bar each list must clear on its own, and votes cast for lists that fall short do not convert into seats. When discontent scatters across three columns, the risk grows that one of them stalls at the threshold while its votes are redistributed in favor of the strongest list. A combined majority of the government’s opponents can thus, paradoxically, end up as a minority of seats.

Who benefits from the division?

The mathematics of the electoral system works here in favor of the ruling party. The more dispersed the opposition, the higher the chance that part of its vote is lost at the threshold, and that the remaining seats are allocated so the relative winner gains an absolute advantage. The government did not have to win more votes to win more seats; it was enough for its opponents to run divided.

New DSS, through Boris Marsenic, says a single joint list is hard to reach, which effectively confirms the three-column scenario. The ruling side is for now standing aside from this turmoil, leaving the opposition to define the number of lists on its own. The open question is whether at least partial unification will emerge before the vote is called, say a merger of two of the three columns, or whether each bloc will go its own way.

The students insist their strength lies in independence, the opposition that it lies in diversity, and the arithmetic of the threshold keeps warning that divided resistance loses more easily. To unseat the majority, is it more important to preserve each column’s identity, or to make sure not a single vote is lost at the bar?