Vucic Sets Deadline for Novi Sad Rally: Under a Month
Serbia's president set a deadline, for the first time, for a major rally in Novi Sad and announced a similar gathering in Belgrade, as three polls paint three different pictures of the election race.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said on August 6 in Belgrade that a large rally will be held in Novi Sad within less than a month, and that a similar gathering in the capital is being prepared at the same time. He was speaking at a homecoming ceremony for members of the Sector for Emergency Situations and the Interior Ministry’s helicopter unit, who had just returned from Spain, where they had helped fight large wildfires.
The only new element here is the timing. A rally in Novi Sad had been mentioned before by senior party officials, but without a deadline. Now it has one, at a moment when neither the date for calling early parliamentary elections nor the date for holding them is known.
Vucic also laid out an expectation that goes beyond the usual formula of a nationwide win:
“After all these fascinating polls, I expect a win even in Belgrade, not just at the level of all of Serbia, where I expect a win by a significant margin, but also in Belgrade, and that includes Novi Sad as well.”
The two cities he singled out from the overall result are clearly being tracked as a separate tally. For Novi Sad, the president also said how much time he had put in: he visited the city some ten to twelve times over the past six to seven months, an average of twice a month, before any campaign had officially begun.
Why a big rally when a campaign of small rallies was announced?
SNS president Milos Vucevic had earlier announced a different concept: many small rallies in smaller towns instead of large city gatherings. When we wrote about the party’s tent campaign, it had by then reached around fifteen towns, almost all of them outside the major centers.
The announcement from Belgrade does not cancel that plan, it adds another layer to it. The network of small gatherings covers the electorate the party already has, while the two big rallies in Belgrade and Novi Sad serve as a show of numbers in the places where the pressure is greatest. That comes at a price: a large gathering in a city gets photographed, filmed and counted, so a weak turnout has nowhere to hide.
Three polls, three different races
Three surveys on voters’ electoral preferences were published within a few days of each other:
- New Serbian Political Thought (NSPM): student list 39.6 percent, SNS list 37.5 percent
- CRTA and Stanford University’s Democracy Action Lab: student list 44.9 percent, SNS 35.7 percent, SPS 3.8 percent
- Faktor Plus: SNS 47.1 percent, student list 30.7 percent
The gap between the best and worst result SNS gets across the three surveys is 11.4 percentage points. For the student list, the range is even wider, at 14.2 points. The same race is described, in the same week, as a tight lead for the student list, a commanding lead for the student list, and a decisive advantage for the ruling party.
According to the NSPM poll, the threshold would also be cleared by SPS with 4.9 percent, by the coalition of the Serbian People’s Movement, New Face of Serbia, Ecological Uprising and the Movement for Decentralization with 5.6 percent, and by the coalition of the Party of Freedom and Justice, the SRCE party and the Movement of Free Citizens with 4.2 percent. Branimir Nestorovic’s list would stand at 3.8 percent, and the New DSS would fall below the threshold, at 2.3 percent. The same poll found that a quarter of respondents don’t know who they will vote for, won’t turn out, or won’t say.
That quarter is why August percentages translate poorly into seats. If some of the smaller lists fall short of the threshold, their votes get redistributed, and the balance of power in the Assembly could end up looking different from the raw poll totals.
What the rivals are doing while the campaign hasn’t officially started
The official campaign has not begun, but both leading lists are already active on the ground. The student list is touring villages and running the “Student zove” (“Student Calls”) drive, trying to move beyond university centers and reach residents of smaller towns, undecided voters and past non-voters. SNS is holding village festivities across Serbia and shoring up support in areas that have been its most reliable strongholds for years.
Neither side has published its candidate list yet. It has been announced that the student list will include public figures and university professors, while SNS has said its list will skew younger than the student one.
If the deadline the president gave holds, the Novi Sad rally would fall no later than the first days of September. The election date does not have to be known by then, and the order of moves is visible even without one: the stages first, the announcement after.
