Babusnica residents asked to pick school or sports hall
President Aleksandar Vucic told villagers in Gorcince to decide which second project gets funded, while work on the road to Zvonacka Banja starts in ten days.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic on August 1 asked residents of the village of Gorcince, near Babusnica, to decide themselves which of two remaining local projects should be funded first, saying all three on the table cannot be built at once. He spent the visit at the Nikolic family farm, joined by Deputy Prime Minister and Economy Minister Adrijana Mesarovic and Agriculture, Forestry and Water Management Minister Dragan Glamocic. Babusnica municipality head Ivana Stojcic also attended.
Three items were on the list:
- the road to Zvonacka Banja, roughly seven kilometers, with works worth at least 3 million euros
- reconstruction of the Vuk Karadzic secondary school
- construction of a new sports hall
The road was taken off the ballot on the spot. Vucic said machinery would move onto that stretch within ten days. For the other two, he asked the crowd to speak up.
“The road to Zvonacka Banja is very important. That is about seven kilometers of road, and the value of the works is not less than three million euros.”
The stretch feeds into the Pirot, Babusnica, Vlasotince route, about 30 kilometers long, which Vucic said is already finished. That would give the spa town a link to a main road it has never had.
Who decides which project comes second?
The mechanism he offered is as direct as it gets: people standing in one place say what matters more, the school or the hall. The result of that show of hands was not made public, and no date or document was named for when the choice becomes binding. The only reading of the crowd Vucic put into words concerned the road.
“From the applause I understood that the road matters most to you.”
He offered no such reading for the school or the hall. Until that is known, Babusnica has one project with a deadline and two without, and the deadline is the only part of the arithmetic anyone can check on the ground within a fortnight.
From 202 euros to 798
The president boiled the economic part of his speech down to a single comparison.
“Do you know what the salary was in Babusnica in 2012? 202 euros. Do you know what it is today? 798 euros.”
These are nominal figures in euros, in one of Serbia’s smallest municipalities by population. Vucic added that the state has no problem with public debt and that Serbia is a low-debt country, then promised increases on three fronts.
“There will be a significant increase in pensions, not just the one-off payment you will receive in a month, but a significant increase in pensions, a significant increase in public sector wages, and a significant increase in the minimum wage.”
He gave no percentage for any of the three. The only timeframe mentioned was the one-off payment to pensioners, due in a month. On the same tour of the southeast he also floated a 15 to 20 percent raise for rural doctors, a promise we covered earlier alongside his pledge to bring the army back to Pirot.
Demographics as the frame
The biggest problem he named is not an infrastructure one.
“In 10 years we have lost almost 500,000 people, because we have no children.”
He held up Pirot as the counterexample, where about 300 babies had been born by mid-year, with the figure expected to reach at least 550 by December, something he said has not happened in more than a decade. That arithmetic sits directly on top of the choice put to Babusnica. A school and a sports hall only make sense if there are children to fill them, while a road works regardless of how many people stay.
Thanks for a year and a half
Before leaving Gorcince, the president thanked those gathered for what he called their endurance.
“Thank you for enduring the terror for a year and a half.”
He added that they had always stood firmly behind Serbia. The year and a half matches the length of the blockades, the standing subject of his summer appearances outside Belgrade.
Earlier the same day, Vucic visited the Pancic family farm and rural tourism estate in the village of Temska near Pirot, along with the Monastery of Saint George. He left Babusnica with one verifiable date attached: within ten days, meaning around August 11, machinery should be working on the road toward Zvonacka Banja. Everything else, the school and the hall alike, waits on a choice that has not been announced.
