Balint Pastor Submits SVM List for October 25 Vote

The Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians (SVM), a coalition partner in the government, submitted its candidate list today, September 15, to the Republic Election Commission (RIK) for the snap parliamentary election scheduled for October 25. The list is named “Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians, dr. Balint Pastor,” and its lead candidate is party president Balint Pastor. Along with the list, SVM submitted 9,531 certified signatures of support and nominated 250 candidates.

Alongside Pastor, the submission was attended by SVM deputy president Boris Bajic, the party’s Executive Board president Balint Juhas, and Presidency member Elvira Kovac. SVM is running in the election as a minority list, and the party has announced its campaign under the slogan “Hungarian Unity.”

When submitting the list, Pastor said SVM would present a detailed election program in the coming weeks, along with the results the party has achieved over the previous period. He also explained where this year’s campaign slogan came from.

“Our slogan is ‘Hungarian Unity,’ because, as in the previous period, we want to keep highlighting and presenting the unity of Hungarians in the National Assembly of Serbia going forward. Other Hungarian parties and civic organizations will support us too, but ‘Hungarian unity’ does not primarily mean that. It means we defined the goals of our program together with Hungarians, people who are members of the Vojvodina Hungarian community, and that we worked together with them to represent their interests during the previous period as well,” Pastor said.

The SVM president called on members of the Vojvodina Hungarian community to support the list in the October 25 election, and he announced that the party would cooperate on the ground with other Hungarian parties and civic organizations, without going into detail about that cooperation.

How Are Mandates Allocated to Minority Lists?

For national minority parties, which include SVM, the general three percent election threshold does not apply. Instead, they are subject to what is known as the natural threshold. This means the number of seats a minority list can win depends solely on the number of votes it receives relative to the number of votes needed to win a single seat in the National Assembly, with no minimum vote share required to enter parliament.

On top of that, the results minority lists achieve in the election are increased by 35 percent before seats are allocated. This mechanism exists so that national minorities, whose pool of voters is naturally smaller than that of majority parties, have a more realistic chance of entering parliament in proportion to their share of the electorate.

Which Lists Have Been Submitted to RIK So Far?

SVM’s submission comes as the Republic Election Commission has already received applications from several other participants in the snap parliamentary election. According to information available so far, the lists submitted include “Aleksandar Vucic, United Serbia,” “Ivica Dacic, Stability Factor” (built around the Socialist Party of Serbia), the student movement list “Student List, Students Win,” and the coalition list “Rasim Ljajic, People’s (SDP, CDP).”

Of those, RIK has so far certified two lists, “Aleksandar Vucic, United Serbia” and “Ivica Dacic, Stability Factor,” while the others remain under review. The deadline for submitting election lists is still open, so the number of registered participants is expected to grow further in the coming days.

SVM has regularly been part of the national governing coalition in recent years, and the party also ran independently in the previous parliamentary election, as a minority list led by Balint Pastor. It is still unclear whether, as the list’s lead candidate announced, some of the remaining Hungarian parties or civic organizations in Vojvodina will formally join SVM by the end of the campaign.