Narodna Srbija Alliance Collapses Before October Vote
New Face of Serbia and Ecological Uprising are leaving Narodna Srbija to back the student list ahead of the October 25 election, as sources say the whole coalition is withdrawing.
The three party opposition alliance Narodna Srbija began falling apart just five days after it was formed. New Face of Serbia and Ecological Uprising announced today, September 15, within about half an hour of each other, that they are leaving the joint list and shifting their support to the Student List ahead of the snap parliamentary election on October 25. According to the Nova.rs portal, the coalition had already agreed the previous evening to pull out of the race entirely.
The Narodna Srbija coalition, running under the joint list name Izbor naroda (People’s Choice), was made up of the Serbian People’s Movement led by Miroslav Aleksic, New Face of Serbia led by Milos Parandilovic, and Ecological Uprising led by Aleksandar Jovanovic Cuta. The coalition agreement was signed on September 10.
First to move: Parandilovic
The first signal that the alliance was cracking came at 12:18pm, when N1 unofficially reported that the presidency of New Face of Serbia had decided to leave Narodna Srbija and side with the students. The portal soon followed with a more detailed version: on Parandilovic’s initiative, the presidency had unanimously proposed to its coalition partners that they withdraw the joint list and back the student list, with a clear ultimatum attached if the proposal failed.
“If such a proposal were rejected, New Face of Serbia would withdraw from the coalition,” the party’s presidency said in its decision, as cited by N1.
Behind the decision was an event from two days earlier. The entire Municipal Board of New Face of Serbia in Bajina Basta, together with all of its councilors, quit the party, and board president Zvonko Lazarevic submitted an irrevocable resignation. He explained the move, in his own words, as a matter of moral principle and deep disagreement with decisions made at the top of the party.
“Our one obligation is to give maximum support to those with the best chance of defeating this evil that is the regime. That is why the decision to leave was made unanimously,” Lazarevic said in a statement carried by N1.
Lazarevic said this does not mark the end of the board’s political fight. “The question is simple: Serbia or the mafia? Serbia, of course! Full support to the student list,” he concluded. N1’s newsroom sought comment from Parandilovic, but the New Face of Serbia leader had not responded to their call by the time that report was published.
Cuta joins in, then the whole coalition
Ecological Uprising, led by Aleksandar Jovanovic Cuta, followed Parandilovic’s move that same afternoon. N1 unofficially reported at 1:06pm that the movement was dropping out of the race, and Nova.rs, citing its own sources, reported three minutes later that Ecological Uprising was withdrawing from the Narodna Srbija list and throwing its support behind the students.
Twenty minutes later, Nova.rs published a fuller version of the story, citing sources close to the top of the alliance. According to those sources, the decision to pull the entire alliance out of the race was made, after talks, by all three leaders, Miroslav Aleksic, Milos Parandilovic and Aleksandar Jovanovic Cuta, on the evening of September 14. The plan reported by Nova.rs was for the coalition to still hand in its signatures to the Republic Election Commission (RIK), so the work of members who had collected them in the field would not go to waste, and only then formally announce the list’s withdrawal.
A joint press conference, at which the alliance is expected to explain its next step, was announced for 5:30pm outside the RIK building. As of this report, the conference had not yet taken place, so whether the alliance will indeed confirm the signature handover and the subsequent withdrawal of its list, as N1 and Nova.rs are unofficially reporting, will only be settled at the scheduled event itself.
Part of a broader pattern of departures
Today’s developments continue a pattern Srpske vesti had already been tracking, one in which local boards close to Parandilovic began backing the students and the Democratic Party called on Miroslav Aleksic and Dragan Djilas to withdraw their own lists in favor of the Student List. The list of parties and movements that have already thrown their weight behind that list is already long, running from parliamentary parties such as the Democratic Party and the Green Left Front, through non parliamentary movements, to dozens of local citizens’ groups across Serbia.
If the announced scenario is confirmed at the press conference outside the RIK, the Narodna Srbija alliance would become the first registered coalition in this election to submit its signatures and then withdraw its own list in favor of the students. Until then, only one thing is certain: the three parties that signed a joint agreement five days ago cannot even agree today on which of them was the first to decide to leave.
