Opposition weighs three tickets for October vote
New DSS leader Milos Jovanovic wants the opposition to run on three separate tickets, while Nikola Jovanovic puts the election in mid-October and says five percent of the vote will settle it.
- Nikola Jovanovic expects the vote in mid-October and says at most five percent of the ballots will decide it.
- Milos Jovanovic proposes three separate opposition tickets: a student list, an authentic right and a pro-European coalition.
- In the 2023 parliamentary election, right-wing parties drew about 500,000 voters, roughly 15 percent of turnout.
- New DSS is sticking to its refusal to take part in the work of the National Assembly.
Serbia’s opposition has picked up two things in the past few days that it did not have before: a date it is willing to name and a price it is willing to quote. Nikola Jovanovic, director of the Centre for Local Self-Government and former head of the opposition councillors’ group in the Belgrade City Assembly, said it is realistic to expect the election in mid-October and that at most five percent of the vote will decide the outcome. Milos Jovanovic, leader of New DSS, said on July 28 that a high turnout improves the chances of unseating the government, and proposed that the opposition contest the October vote on three separate tickets rather than one.
The two assessments do not clash. They compound. If the result hinges on five percent, the number of tickets stops being an internal party matter and turns into arithmetic with very little room for error.
Why the opposition is looking at October
The timetable is not one man’s guess. Two days earlier, People’s Movement of Serbia leader Miroslav Aleksic argued that a presidential election cannot be held before October 4 and that the ruling party has no strong candidate for head of state, which we covered in Aleksic: no presidential vote before October 4. Read together, the opposition statements point to the same sequence: a parliamentary vote in autumn, a presidential race after it.
For the parties, that means coalition talks and campaign preparation running in parallel over a few weeks rather than a few months. Compressed calendars of that kind usually favour whoever already has an organisation on the ground.
The five percent that settles it
Jovanovic draws his figure from a balance of power he believes has shifted. The government might be willing to lose a presidential election, he said, because that would count as a democratic outcome and cohabitation as a sign of pluralism. Yet the presidential vote itself, and local elections in the larger cities even more so, is something he says it can hardly win any more.
He also points to a factor absent from earlier cycles. The student movement, he argues, produced something the country has not seen since 2014: serious mobilisation first, then a serious structure behind it. His explanation lies in how voters read the students.
Nobody sees them as people out for their own interest, and the students themselves have no particular interest, only a long-term longing for society to be arranged so that they can stay in it and then prosper
That reading doubles as the case for a separate student ticket, because the advantage he describes evaporates the moment the movement’s name appears on a joint list with parties.
Three tickets and the voters on the right
The New DSS proposal is specific: a student list, an authentic right and a pro-European coalition. The authentic right, as Jovanovic defines it, backs a change of government and cooperation with the European Union while opposing Serbian membership in the bloc.
His supporting number comes from the last cycle. In the 2023 parliamentary election, he says, right-wing parties took about 500,000 votes, roughly 15 percent of those who turned out. That is a bloc a single pro-European list covers poorly, and one that a five percent margin cannot afford to write off.
On the presidential race, the same man asks for the opposite of fragmentation. Speaking to the daily Danas, he said the question of which candidate the whole opposition could line up behind matters more than whom the government puts forward.
That of course means sitting down at the table and all agreeing on it. I think that is the only reasonable path
The model is now on the record: separate tickets for parliament, one name for the presidency. Each of the three tickets would have to clear the electoral threshold on its own, a risk a joint list does not carry.
What is still unresolved
New DSS continues to withhold legitimacy from the National Assembly by staying out of its sessions, arguing that the government forfeited its legitimacy a year and a half ago when it began confronting citizens by force. A party outside the chamber enters the campaign without a parliamentary rostrum, and without any share of the blame for what happens in it.
No agreement on the number of tickets, on a candidate or on a date has been reached. If mid-October holds, the opposition has a few weeks to choose between three columns and one, and the answer will be visible the day the Republic Electoral Commission starts accepting candidate lists.
