Lawyer Demands Hearing After Nova Varos Vote Confession
A Nova Varos resident told the president at a rally that she was promised a job in 2020 for collecting votes. Lawyer Nikola Lakic wants her and two officials questioned urgently.
Lawyer Nikola Lakic asked on August 11 for prosecutors to urgently question a Nova Varos resident who, a day earlier, at a rally with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, said she had been promised a job in 2020 if she collected a certain number of votes. Lakic is also seeking the questioning of two officials she named while standing on stage behind the president: the acting director of the state forestry company JP Srbijasume, Krsta Janjusevic, and the president of the Nova Varos municipality, Branko Bjelic.
The scene unfolded on Monday, August 10, during the first day of Vucic’s tour of southwestern Serbia. The woman directed her question at the president, but addressed it to the two men standing behind him.
“Can Krsta Janjusevic and Branko Bjelic answer me: in 2020 I was promised that I would get a job. I was told then that if I collected a certain number of votes, I would get the job.”
She immediately added a personal detail about a neighborly relationship that has since ended: “Bjelic is my neighbor and since then he can’t even say ‘good day’. What I want to know is why I didn’t get that job, when I was promised I would.”
She did not specify which job was at stake. Nor did she say for which political option she had collected the votes, though she claimed to have proof that she did.
Vucic first said no one would be removed from the rally. “We won’t remove anyone while I’m here. Everyone has the right to say what they want,” the president said, then asked the woman to let him answer. His reply was short and sent her back to the local level.
“Whatever you have with the two of them, settle with the two of them. Why didn’t you go to see them at the municipality?” Vucic asked. The woman replied that she had gone, and the exchange ended there. Neither Janjusevic nor Bjelic responded from the stage to her claim.
What crime does the lawyer see in the rally statement?
Lakic made his request publicly, in a statement to the Beta news agency, describing what was said as a confession.
“Yesterday, during Vucic’s address, the entire nation watched a public confession of criminal offenses, of how his criminal regime wins elections, that is, what mechanisms it uses to win elections in an illegal and unlawful way. A young woman’s public admission that she collected capillary votes for the SNS because of a promised job, that her own brother did the same, that they have proof of it, and that it was all done on the orders of Krsta Janjusevic (director of the public company Srbijasume) and Branko Bjelic (president of the Nova Varos municipality), senior SNS officials, is yet another piece of evidence that the SNS abuses public resources in every election campaign, and that a large number of officials are committing criminal offenses.”
The offense the lawyer is pointing to is giving and accepting bribes related to voting, punishable by up to three years in prison. Lakic wants prosecutors to question both the woman, who by her own account placed herself in the role of perpetrator, and the two named officials.
“Prosecutors should react urgently, question the young woman who is publicly admitting she committed a criminal offense, but also question the SNS officials she identified as the people who offered her a bribe related to voting,” he said.
The focus of his request is not on the two named men. “The most important thing is to establish on whose orders these SNS officials acted,” Lakic specified, adding that this is not an isolated case.
What was said, and what was added
The gap between the rally statement and its legal framing is not small. The woman spoke about a promised job and about votes, without naming a party or describing any mechanism. The name SNS, the term capillary votes, and the claim about who gave the orders come from the lawyer, not from her.
For prosecutors that means two separate jobs: first to establish exactly what was said and what evidence she mentioned, and only then whether an offense lies behind it, and whose orders were involved.
The rally in Nova Varos otherwise followed the pattern of Vucic’s tours. He promised residents the state would fund a water supply network and a ski slope, and answered dozens of requests for local road paving with a hard limit. “I can’t haggle with everyone over roads, we’ll build 25 to 30 kilometers, which will cost seven to eight million euros, and you agree among yourselves which roads those will be,” he said, visibly irritated, adding that he could not remember feeling so bad, as if he had come “to a firing squad.” He told Bjelic he needs to go out to the villages and not promise what he cannot deliver.
Asked by N1 whether he is on an official campaign tour by touring Serbia, Vucic recently replied that he was sorry for not going on summer vacation and for doing his job.
