Nestorovic Movement: Jovanovic Invents Our Positions

The Mi Snaga Naroda movement of Prof. Branimir Nestorovic sent the srpske.rs newsroom a statement today, August 25, answering fresh criticism from Milos Jovanovic, the leader of Novi DSS. The message arrived by email at 10:05 AM, with a request that it be published. The newsroom verified the sender.

The trigger, according to the statement, was Jovanovic’s appearance on the programme Probudi se on Nova television. The movement says that during that appearance Nestorovic was once again cast as someone unwilling to see the government fall, and that Jovanovic said in the same breath that he had never spoken to Nestorovic.

The central objection

The sharpest passage of the statement turns on precisely that mismatch:

It is particularly shameful that Jovanovic ascribes political motives and positions on toppling the regime to Nestorovic, even though, as he said himself, he has never even spoken to Nestorovic. If he has never spoken to the man, on what basis does he know what Nestorovic wants, what he does not want and what his political motives are? This is no longer political debate, it is arbitrary labelling of voters and an attempt to mislead the public.

The movement then turns to what it sees as a contradiction in Jovanovic’s position:

Jovanovic speaks at the same time about an authentic right and about the need for all opposition actors to cooperate, while it is he who continuously attacks one of the most significant political actors, one clearly positioned on national and sovereigntist politics. It is even more hypocritical when someone calling for cooperation among all opposition actors attaches conditions to that cooperation in advance while smearing the very people he claims to want as partners.

The reference to an authentic right is not arbitrary. On August 21 Jovanovic said the NADA coalition would contest the elections on a list of the authentic right, inviting partners committed to changing the government and to cooperation between Serbia and the European Union short of membership. The movement now argues that the invitation narrows in practice once the conditions are applied.

A quarrel running since June

The feud is not new. The coalition between Novi DSS and Nestorovic’s movement collapsed on 8 June this year, before it was ever formally announced. Jovanovic said at the time that Nestorovic had already stated he would not bring down Aleksandar Vucic but would work with him instead, and called that approach naive. The reply came from Borislav Antonijevic, the movement’s deputy leader, who said the professor would accept even minority backing from the government in order to form a cabinet of his own, and that Nestorovic does want the regime out. Antonijevic called Jovanovic a self-proclaimed leader of the opposition right, and the same phrase appears in the headline of today’s statement.

The 2024 boycott as counterargument

The movement answers by pointing to Jovanovic’s own electoral record:

We remind Milos Jovanovic and the public that by boycotting the 2024 Belgrade elections Novi DSS made a political decision that it must have known would help the SNS administration survive in the city institutions. That is why it is entirely unserious for him to declare Nestorovic someone who does not want to bring down the regime.

That claim holds up. Novi DSS did boycott the Belgrade elections held on 2 June 2024, together with the Movement for the Restoration of the Kingdom of Serbia, its partner in the NADA coalition. The opposition was split on the question at the time: part of it stood in the elections, and the wider plan for a joint boycott failed because most of the partners of the day opposed it.

A comparison with the governing method

The harshest passage compares Jovanovic’s way of arguing with the one the movement attributes to the Serbian president:

What is particularly worrying is that Jovanovic’s methodology increasingly resembles the one Aleksandar Vucic has applied for years: first the opponent is credited with something he never said, then that invented claim is presented as fact, and then a political indictment is built on top of it.

The statement closes with what the movement considers the decent order of business:

Milos Jovanovic has every right to disagree with Nestorovic, but he has no right to invent his positions and motives, nor to treat voters as an audience that can be served any political construction at all. That is neither ethical, nor moral, nor politically correct, and it serves only to deceive the public. If he has never spoken to Nestorovic, it would be decent to speak to him first and only then to speak on his behalf. Anything else is exactly what he claims to want to bring down, a politics of deception, labelling and manipulation.

The newsroom was unable to confirm the content of Jovanovic’s appearance on Probudi se from an independent source before publication, so the description of that appearance rests on the movement’s account. Novi DSS had not responded to the statement by the time of publication, nor had Jovanovic replied to it.

The Mi Snaga Naroda movement currently holds five of the 250 seats in the Serbian parliament, in the parliamentary group Mi Snaga Naroda Prof. Dr Branimir Nestorovic. Milos Jovanovic has led Novi DSS since 2017.