CRTA: Vucic Made 129 Live Appearances in August
CRTA counted 129 live appearances by President Aleksandar Vucic in August alone, and a thousand different activities by state officials tracked since March.
The watchdog organization CRTA has counted 129 live appearances by President Aleksandar Vucic in August alone, while a broader tally of a thousand different activities by state officials has been recorded since March. The figures were given to the FoNet news agency by Pavle Dimitrijevic of CRTA, and carried by N1 on September 6.
In his assessment, the numbers show that the line between the ruling party and the state is being erased faster in this campaign than before.
This pre election campaign is breaking every record when it comes to erasing the line between party and state, that is, when it comes to abuse of public office
Dimitrijevic said, adding that the thousand activities by officials logged since March point to a scale CRTA tracks systematically, week after week, rather than isolated slip ups.
Dimitrijevic spoke specifically about two laws the National Assembly recently amended, the one on preventing corruption and the one on financing political activities. In his view, judging their real effect will have to wait for how they play out in practice.
The effects of the recent amendments to the Law on the Prevention of Corruption and the Law on the Financing of Political Activities can only be discussed once we see them implemented, but the key problems in the electoral process have not been addressed by these changes in any way
he said, and he was specific about what the amendments leave untouched. By his account, five points remain unresolved:
- pressure on voters
- the conduct of the prosecution
- impunity in the electoral process
- media inequality
- abuse of public resources
Dimitrijevic said that without progress on these fronts, there can be no talk of meaningful change in the electoral process itself, however much the legal text has formally been expanded.
The FoNet interviewee is also cautious about how much opinion polls and figures on officials’ public appearances actually say about the outcome of an election. In his view, polling results cannot be read as a fully reliable predictor of how support will translate into votes, since much depends on the climate and the moment when the election is eventually called. Still, Dimitrijevic said, there is a case to be made that a larger share of citizens are ready for change, and not just a change of government but a change in how power itself is exercised.
From that he draws a conclusion about the contest between the parties themselves, which he describes as unusually open by the standards of Serbia’s recent years.
For the first time we are in a situation where we have a competitive electoral process, meaning there is no single actor who is the undisputed winner of the election, while everyone else is merely running to clear the threshold
Dimitrijevic concluded.
CRTA is one of the organizations in Serbia that systematically monitors the electoral and pre election activity of state officials, issuing regular reports throughout campaigns. This time, according to Dimitrijevic, its focus for the first time also includes the assessment that legal intervention on its own, without a change in practice on the ground, changes nothing on the five points listed above. Whether the relevant institutions, first and foremost the prosecution, will act on this before the campaign formally begins remains an open question, one whose answer depends on the date the election is called, which is not yet known.
The figure of 129 appearances refers strictly to August and strictly to programs broadcast live, while the thousand activities is a broader count that CRTA has kept since March and that covers all officials, not just the president. The gap between the two numbers, Dimitrijevic said, shows this is a wide and continuous promotional machine rather than isolated exceptions that could be explained away as officials simply doing their jobs. The amendments to the Law on the Prevention of Corruption and the Law on the Financing of Political Activities, he noted, were adopted only recently, so their effect on actual practice has yet to be measured in the coming months.
A response from government representatives to the figures and assessments presented here was not available by the time this article was published.
