Vucevic: Campaign will be tough, SNS turns to small towns

Milos Vucevic, president of the Serbian Progressive Party, said on July 28, speaking on the morning programme of Prva television, that the coming election campaign will be uncertain and difficult, and that his party will not repeat the formula voters have grown used to. Instead of large rallies in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Nis, SNS candidates will tour smaller towns and hold a large number of small gatherings built around direct contact with people.

“It will not be easy to win, but we will do everything to show that we are competitive,” Vucevic said, adding that the party expects a very tight campaign and will be careful about what it says and does. He explained the change of format as a wish for candidates to show they are “people of flesh and blood” rather than names on a list who appear only on a stage. Conversations in groups of ten to twenty people, he argued, are the only way to hear what citizens actually think.

Why is SNS abandoning the big-rally formula?

The admission that the outcome is not secure is the new element here. For years the leadership of the governing party built its campaigns on a display of numbers: buses, sports halls, a central rally a few days before the vote. Vucevic’s announcement that the party is moving in the opposite direction, towards smaller towns and living-room conversations, concedes what has not been said out loud until now, that mass rallies no longer decide elections and that the party needs a different channel to reach the dissatisfied or undecided voter.

There is arithmetic behind it as well. Small gatherings are cheaper to organise, they are harder to film as a failure if the turnout is thin, and they let a local candidate talk about the water supply and the health clinic instead of the national themes that are currently working against his party. The risk is the other side of the same coin: without a central event to hold the attention of the media, a campaign fragments into dozens of local stories that are hard to fold into a single message.

The president’s resignation and a campaign as a citizen

The second part of Vucevic’s announcement concerns Aleksandar Vucic. The SNS leader specified that Vucic will resign as head of state soon after parliamentary elections are called, and will then take part in the campaign as a citizen and a party member. In practice that would remove the constraint the presidential office places on open party campaigning, and hand the campaign an actor no longer bound by formal limits.

Vucevic also answered objections that the conditions for the vote are disputed. Uncertainty about the outcome, he said, is precisely the reason elections are held, not an argument against holding them. He repeated his call for opposition representatives to sit down with the president and described their refusal to talk as surprising. Parts of the opposition and the student movement have spent months demanding different electoral conditions before any vote, so the offer of dialogue is aimed at interlocutors who have already said that negotiations under present circumstances mean little to them.

The SNS president also condemned death threats sent to Vucic on social media, warning that such messages become routine if society fails to react to them. That theme, which surfaces on both sides of Serbian politics, arrived this time packaged with a campaign announcement, which gives it added weight in a pre-election context.

What remains open is how much of an election result can be engineered by changes of form. Smaller gatherings mean more encounters with people who are not a hand-picked audience, and for any government that is the least predictable format there is. Would a campaign of small gatherings persuade you more than a rally with tens of thousands of people?