Parandilovic Party Collapse: Four Boards Back Students
Zvonko Lazarevic, head of the New Face of Serbia board in Bajina Basta, resigned, and the party also lost its boards in Malo Crnice and Kostolac, plus the Kucevo office, to the Student List.
The first in a string of resignations that would tear apart part of the New Face of Serbia party’s local network in just two days was filed on Sunday, September 13, in Bajina Basta. Zvonko Lazarevic, president of the party’s Municipal Board in Bajina Basta, submitted an irrevocable resignation, and the entire municipal board left the party with him, along with the councillors in the local assembly.
The reason Lazarevic gave was deep disagreement with decisions coming from the top of Milos Parandilovic’s party. He described the decision to leave above all as a matter of conscience.
Lazarevic wrote in his statement:
I want to inform you that I am submitting my irrevocable resignation as president of the Municipal Board of the New Face of Serbia party in Bajina Basta. Also, the entire municipal board and our councillors have decided to leave the party.
He also explained why the decision was unanimous, adding that his board’s political fight does not end with it.
Our one shared obligation is to give maximum support to those who have the best chance of defeating this evil coming from the regime. That is why the decision to leave was unanimous. I have said many times before: if we were better, we would be better off.
At the end of the statement he made clear which side the whole board is now on. “The question is clear: Serbia or the mafia? Serbia, of course! Full support to the Student List,” Lazarevic concluded.
Three more boards leave the next day
What looked like an isolated case on Sunday turned out, by Monday, September 14, to be a wider wave. Goran Dacic, vice president of New Face of Serbia, said in a written statement that the municipal boards in Malo Crnice and Kostolac, as well as the party’s trustee office in Kucevo, had also left the party.
Our three councillors in the Malo Crnice municipal assembly, as well as two councillors in the Bajina Basta municipal assembly, will continue to represent only the interests of the people who elected them, and aware of the weight of this moment, with parliamentary elections now called, we have decided to give our political energy, our work in the field and our full support to the Student List.
That is what the statement signed by Dacic says. By that count, the party loses the support of five councillors in the field, three in Malo Crnice and two in Bajina Basta, who keep their mandates but switch their political allegiance to the Student List. The statement does not give a number of departing councillors for Kostolac or Kucevo.
Why now
New Face of Serbia, the party led by Milos Parandilovic, is running in the snap parliamentary election on October 25 as part of the “People’s Serbia” coalition, together with Miroslav Aleksic’s Serbian People’s Movement and Aleksandar Jovanovic Cuta’s Ecological Uprising. The joint list is called “People’s Choice.”
The departure of four local boards comes just as the election campaign is taking shape, and marks the first recorded case of an entire local structure of an opposition party collectively backing the Student List instead of the coalition its parent party belongs to. No split of this kind, inside any opposition camp, has previously been recorded over the Student List.
Parandilovic had earlier, appearing on television, spoken sharply about the people gathered around the Student List. He argued the list would run into trouble because, as he put it, many dishonest people had hidden behind it.
The Student List will have a problem because there are many dishonest people who have hidden behind that list, people who had no trouble staying silent for fifteen years.
On that occasion Parandilovic also accused the Democratic Party of secretly placing its own people on the Student List, arguing the list would be stronger if certain opposition leaders were not backing it.
No response from party leadership
Neither Parandilovic nor the New Face of Serbia leadership had responded, by the time this article was published, to the departure of the boards in Bajina Basta, Malo Crnice, Kostolac and Kucevo. The party has made no official statement on the resignations, nor said whether it plans to fill the vacated seats on its local boards.
What remains an open question is whether the collapse stops at these four boards, or whether Milos Parandilovic’s party will lose its grip on other local structures as well before October 25, when Serbia votes for a new parliament.
