Milivojevic: DS Election Observers Now Number 2,784

Democratic Party leader Srdjan Milivojevic has laid out the details behind the newly formed parliamentary group “MPs with the Students: For Election Oversight,” after the announcement that DS was handing its seats on election boards to the student list drew days of public reaction. In comments to the newspaper Nova, Milivojevic also addressed who exactly belongs to the group, including a lawmaker who entered parliament on the list built around President Aleksandar Vucic.

The group grew out of the DS parliamentary caucus, which eight independent lawmakers joined. With sixteen members, it is now the second-largest in the National Assembly, right behind the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS).

How Many Observers Are There, 2,784 or 2,700?

Milivojevic says that doubling the group from eight to sixteen lawmakers also doubled the number of election observers DS can place in the permanent composition of election boards, from 1,392 to 2,784. He gave that figure on August 31. Two days earlier, on August 28, N1 and Danas had reported a different number, 2,700 observers, citing the same source inside DS. The gap is small but real, and it has not been explained whether it comes from a more precise count or from a change in the underlying calculation.

Milivojevic backed up the logic with a per-mandate breakdown.

“DS remains outside the work of the Assembly, and we will place every seat the group is entitled to in the permanent composition of the election boards at the disposal of the student list. With eight lawmakers we had 1,392 seats, and with 16 we have 2,784. Every new mandate brings roughly 200 additional observers,” Milivojevic said.

The math is simple: one parliamentary mandate, he says, carries an average of about 200 election-board seats across Serbia. The goal, he adds, is oversight of the parliamentary elections announced for October.

Why Albijanic Is Controversial

The question drawing the most attention in recent days is whether Miloljub Albijanic, as Danas described it, has effectively become a member of the Democratic Party. Albijanic entered the National Assembly as a Healthy Serbia candidate on the list built around Vucic. Milivojevic does not dispute that.

“Albijanic was elected as a Healthy Serbia candidate on Vucic’s list, and no one is hiding that fact,” Milivojevic told Nova. According to him, Albijanic publicly backed the students in April 2025, left the Vucic majority and the post of Healthy Serbia deputy leader, and has acted as an independent lawmaker ever since. His mandate, Milivojevic says, brings the student list roughly 200 observers, and brings him no privilege of his own.

The DS leader was precise about what joining the group does not mean.

“He did not move to DS, did not become its official, candidate or coalition partner, and his membership in the group brings him no favor in return. We are not aligning platforms or ideological positions,” Milivojevic said of Albijanic.

With that, he rejected the suggestion that DS is using election oversight as cover to pad its own ranks with other parties’ mandates. He summed up the message in a single line that appears to answer all the controversy of recent days: the new group “erases no one’s biography and grants no pardon.”

A Purpose-Built Framework, Not a Party Coalition

Milivojevic described the group as a tool with a single purpose, with no ambition of becoming a lasting parliamentary alliance.

“A purpose-built parliamentary framework with one strictly limited goal: to turn existing mandates into as many people as possible who will safeguard citizens’ electoral will at the polling stations,” the DS leader said.

With that framing, Milivojevic separates two questions that had become blurred in public debate: political alignment, and the technical allocation of election-board seats. DS had earlier announced that it would hand over every seat it is entitled to in the permanent composition of election boards to the student list, a decision we reported when it was first announced. Today’s remarks are the first time the party leader has publicly defended both the logic behind the numbers and the status of lawmakers who never formally joined DS.

Before the elections announced for October, no one has said whether the group will grow further with new independent lawmakers, or whether the final number of observers in the permanent composition will land closer to the figure Milivojevic gave or the one reported earlier by the news agencies.