Jovanovic: Three Reasons New DSS Runs Alone

New Democratic Party of Serbia leader Milos Jovanovic told N1 television on August 26 that there are reasons of principle, politics, and practicality for the authentic right to run separately in the announced parliamentary elections. It was the first time he had broken down, point by point, an argument that New DSS had so far only announced, and the core of his case is that the Student List, with its pro-European orientation, does not answer the questions that matter to right-wing voters.

Jovanovic laid out the three reasons one after another, without hedging.

“As a matter of principle, because any political party that backs another organization in an election abolishes its own reason for existing; politically, because the student list is at its core pro-European and has no answers to the questions that concern our voters; and practically, because the right won 500,000 votes in the previous parliamentary elections, and if we don’t rally those voters, they will go to some pro-regime option,” Jovanovic told N1 television.

The three reasons, as the New DSS leader laid them out, sit on different levels. The first is almost a matter of party doctrine: backing someone else’s list, by this logic, amounts to admitting that your own organization has no independent reason to run at all. The second is substantive, resting on Jovanovic’s view that the Student List offers no answers to the questions driving the right wing voter bloc. The third is a matter of arithmetic: the 500,000 votes the right won in the previous parliamentary elections are, in Jovanovic’s telling, capital that has to be rallied under its own name, because otherwise, he said, it would go to a pro-regime option.

That last reason is also the most pragmatic one, and it is the one that explains why New DSS is insisting on running alone rather than joining a shared list with the wider opposition. The calculation assumes that a vote which finds no clear right wing destination does not stay neutral. It goes to the other side.

Jovanovic also said the current government “cannot organize fair and democratic elections,” a position New DSS has held for some time. He recalled that the party, together with “almost the entire parliamentary opposition,” had pushed for a transitional government tasked with improving election conditions, so that the Serbian Progressive Party could not manipulate the results again and so that all sides would accept the outcome of the vote. Despite that assessment of the conditions, he also said New DSS “will do everything it can to see that everything around the elections goes peacefully.”

The statement comes as Serbia’s opposition enters the election campaign visibly divided. Srpske Vesti has previously reported that the opposition is entering the elections split into three columns, and Jovanovic’s explanation now spells out why one of those columns, the authentic right gathered around New DSS, will not agree to merge with the list that grew out of the student movement. What began as a tactical difference between the two wings of the opposition has, in Jovanovic’s account, become an ideological one as well.

It remains an open question whether the 500,000 votes from the previous cycle, the figure New DSS is counting on, will stay rallied around an independent right wing list or will, precisely because of the opposition’s fragmentation, spill over to the other side that Jovanovic named as the risk. Only the election results themselves, once a voting date is officially set, will answer that.