Student List Submits 250 Candidates to RIK

Representatives of the student blockade movement submitted the “Student List, Students Win” election list, with 250 candidates for parliament, to the Republic Election Commission (RIK) on the evening of September 14. The list was handed in at RIK headquarters on Kralja Milana Street in Belgrade, ahead of the early parliamentary elections scheduled for October 25.

The column set out from outside the Rectorate of the University of Belgrade around 5 p.m., passed through Republic Square and Terazije, and arrived at the RIK building, where trumpeters greeted the students carrying boxes of signatures, and a kolo was danced outside the commission’s headquarters. On September 15, the Public Gatherings Archive published an estimate of the crowd size, obtained by counting people in video footage: at 5:50 p.m., outside the Rectorate, the estimate put the crowd at 6,000 people, and the column heading toward RIK at 8,700. Before the column set off, Nemanja Karovic, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Teacher Education, and Milica Popovic, a student at the Faculty of Dentistry, addressed the gathering outside the Rectorate. “The walk to the Republic Election Commission, where the submission of signatures for the ‘Student List, Students Win’ ballot is planned, is the final step of the student movement on its way to an election victory,” Karovic said.

Sources differ on the number of signatures collected. The portal 021 reports that students speak of around 75,000 signatures, while Tanjug, Telegraf, Morava Info and Ozon Media put the figure at “more than 70,000.” As of this writing, RIK had not announced how many signatures were legally valid, and according to Telegraf and Morava Info, one of the mandatory documents was missing at the time of submission, which students later brought in.

Who is on the list

The list is headed by Ilija Srdanovic, a cardiologist at the Institute for Cardiovascular Diseases of Vojvodina in Sremska Kamenica and a full professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Novi Sad, where he has taught at the emergency medicine department since 2018. He was born in Novi Sad in 1970. Behind him, according to the order reported by Ekspres and Vreme, come Katarina Stankovic, Zeljko Hubac, Aleksandar Cvetkovic, Katarina Scepanovic, Adem Mavric, Milos Jevtic, actor Tihomir Stanic, Tatjana Paunovic and Milina Maric.

The list also includes more recognizable names: former basketball national team member Dejan Bodiroga (24th place), former National Bank of Serbia governor Dejan Soskic (27th), musician Fedja Dimovic (48th), University of Arts rector Mirjana Nikolic and academic Radomir Saicic. According to the BBC in Serbian, one of the boxes of signatures was carried to RIK in person by athlete Mihail Dudas, who is also among the candidates. Media reports say actor Dragan Gagi Jovanovic, former basketball player Vladimir Stimac, Democratic Party MP Zoran Lutovac and Green-Left Front co-president Biljana Djordjevic were also at the gathering outside the Rectorate.

In a statement accompanying the list’s release, the students said the candidates were not chosen by party leaders and that the list was not put together behind closed doors. “We did not look for people who would look best on a billboard, nor those who have known for years how to negotiate a spot on an election list,” the statement said, as carried by N1 and Ekspres.

What happens before Wednesday

The Student List is the third to be submitted to RIK. Before it, the “Aleksandar Vucic, United Serbia” list (224,557 signatures collected, of which 209,130 were confirmed valid) and the “Ivica Dacic, Stability Factor” list (21,266 signatures, 18,162 valid) were submitted and already certified. After the Student List, Rasim Ljajic’s list was submitted (8,053 signatures), and on September 15 so was the list of the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians, with 9,531 certified signatures.

A list needs at least 10,000 certified voter statements to be certified, and RIK has a legal deadline of 48 hours from submission to identify any deficiencies in the documentation. For the Student List, that deadline expires on the evening of September 16. At the time of writing, the RIK website’s most recently published session was the 19th, held on September 14, while the minutes of the September 15 session, at which this list could be decided on, had not yet been published.

The same day the list was submitted to RIK, a tour of Serbia began under the so called Student Plan, an 11-point document divided into three sections: “Serbia or the Mafia,” “Knowledge Is Power” and “Serbia Grows With Us.” The plan is being presented on September 15 at around ten locations in Vojvodina, on September 16 in eastern Serbia, on September 17 in the west, on September 18 in the south, and on September 19 in Belgrade and central Serbia.

Vucic: The real leaders are Pajtic and Petrovic

Ahead of the list’s submission, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, appearing on TV Pink’s National Daily on September 14, disputed that it was really a student list at all. “The real leaders are Pajtic and Dusan Petrovic, so this is not a student list at all, there are no students on it, the real leaders are Pajtic and Dusan Petrovic,” Vucic said, according to B92.

The president also offered a sharper assessment of the list’s intentions: “They want to lustrate, to stew, to flambe, to make people swim somewhere, but they have never told us anything about what they would actually do. They have never told us whether they are for NATO or not. They have never told us exactly what they would do about the question of Kosovo and Metohija.” According to Gledaj.rs, he said the following about Bojan Pajtic the same day: “Pajtic said so himself today, before the list was submitted, that it’s the best list because he put it together. These are his ideological followers.”

Alongside the president’s statements, B92, 24sedam and Informer published, on September 15, a comparison of the average age of candidates on the two lists: 50.6 on the Student List versus 43.5 on the “United Serbia” list. None of those reports said who calculated the averages or by what method. No response from Bojan Pajtic, Dusan Petrovic or Student List representatives to Vucic’s claims about their leadership had been found in any of the sources reviewed by the time this article was published.

Unlike the president, one of the participants in the column, Biljana Divljan from Pancevo, described to the BBC in Serbian what she expects from the list: “I expect a victory for the students, lustration, and that we will avoid the mistakes that were made after the change of regime.” This outlet has previously reported on similar accusations of irregularities in signature collection, in Nis, where certifiers rejected some signatures for the Student List.

Whether RIK’s ruling will arrive before the deadline, and whether the list will be certified without supplementary documentation, should be known no later than the evening of September 16.