Lukic: Nestorovic Could Not Get Out of Car Alone

Five ousted members of the Mi Snaga Naroda presidency, MP Borislav Antonijevic, attorney Branko Lukic (the movement’s deputy president and an MP), MP Slobodan Ilic, and Belgrade city councilor Rastko Ristic, held a press conference on September 15 at the building of Serbia’s National Assembly. MP Marko Zivanovic is also named as ousted in some reports. The account reached the Srpske Vesti newsroom that same day at 2:29 PM, sent from the parliamentary group’s address on the parlament.rs domain.

This is a continuation of a story we reported earlier, when Nestorovic removed five members of the Mi Snaga Naroda presidency. The movement’s disputed Assembly session, at which the removal was voted through, took place on the evening of September 14 at the party’s offices. According to N1, the session was originally scheduled for 6 PM, then moved up to 5 PM, and those removed say they were informed of the change informally, apparently so they would not arrive on time.

At the press conference, Ilic said: “Last night, an outlaw, illegal assembly was held on the premises of the Mi Snaga Naroda party.” He added: “Several dozen people were brought in from Cacilend to vote, in violation of the statute, to remove the majority of the presidency’s members.” According to Ilic, the only item announced on the agenda was running in the elections, and the leadership change, he says, was never supposed to be put to a vote at all. In his words: “Nestorovic only mumbled something at the start about how we need to go into a coalition with Vulin’s Movement of Socialists.” Reports by N1 and Danas also mention, in the same unfinished sentence at the session, a possible alliance with Aleksandar Stamatovic’s Zdrava Srbija.

How Many People Were Actually Bused In?

Here the accounts diverge. At the press conference, Lukic said: “The bus brought in 40 people.” Ilic spoke of several dozen people from Cacilend, and told Danas more precisely that there were around eighty, brought in by bus. Antonijevic, for his part, said: “Of the roughly forty people who voted, I recognized maybe 12 or 13 of them.” All three accounts agree on one point: the group left the hall immediately after the vote, before anyone present could check which local committee they were from or whom they represented. Lukic added that the newcomers could not say which committee they belonged to or who their representative was, and that entire families were visible on the attendance list.

Antonijevic, who stresses that the movement’s statute was violated, told Insajder more precisely: “The president can propose a removal, which the presidency’s two thirds majority must then approve and submit to the Assembly for a vote.” In his reading, the Assembly cannot remove presidency members on its own, bypassing the presidency, and that, he says, is exactly the procedure that was not followed.

Lukic also described how the session itself unfolded: “The session was scheduled for 6 o’clock, and someone told us it would be at 5.” According to the report that reached the newsroom from the parliamentary group, and partly corroborated by the Ozon Press website, the only outlet to name the session’s chair, the vote was never properly concluded because no one asked who was against the proposal or who abstained, while the movement’s Assembly president, Corovic, had promised Lukic the floor only after the vote, which by then had already ended. Outside those two sources, the name Corovic does not appear anywhere else in the available material.

Speaking about Nestorovic’s health, Lukic did not hold back. “The question is how manipulated he is,” he said, adding that the professor could not get out of the car on his own the day before and had to be held up while walking. Not one speaker at the press conference used the word “poisoned”; it appears only in the headline of the Ozon Press article and in the headline of the message sent to the newsroom. The speakers used the words “ill” and “manipulated” instead.

The whole dispute stems from a proposed coalition with Aleksandar Vulin’s Movement of Socialists, which the Mi Snaga Naroda presidency had earlier rejected by majority vote. Antonijevic stresses that the coalition was not put to a vote even at the disputed session, since the session dealt solely with the removals. “Neither the list’s name nor the forms for certifying signatures were adopted, so signature collection cannot even begin,” he said. Ristic used the press conference to call on party members not to vote for Mi Snaga Naroda in the upcoming elections, and rejected the claim that the ousted members wanted to take control of the movement’s money.

According to Danas, Nestorovic responded that same day that he had been in Moscow, in his capacity as head of a party he describes as a strategic partner of the Russian Federation, and that he had been asked there to rally pro-Russian voters in Serbia ahead of the elections. He insists, Danas reports, that the only coalition agreed on is with Vladimir Gajic’s Narodna Stranka, and denies any agreement with Vulin.

That same day, at 7:11 PM, the Movement of Socialists issued a statement saying it had talked with the Mi Snaga Naroda leadership about running together in the elections, but that it did not want to become the cause of an internal split within that movement. Vladimir Gajic confirmed to Danas that Narodna Stranka is running in a coalition with Mi Snaga Naroda and two smaller parties, one of which represents a minority. “We have enough time. We’re not rushing, we’re organizing,” Gajic said, while Danas was unable to establish whether Vulin’s movement is one of those two parties. The list the Serbian Progressive Party submitted for the October 25 elections does not include the Movement of Socialists among its coalition partners, even though Vulin had earlier announced his party would run on a separate list.

At the press conference, Ilic pointed to a recording of the disputed session as evidence that, he says, will go before a court. As of this article’s deadline on September 16, there was no report of whether the coalition splitting the party had submitted an election list to the Republic Election Commission, nor that the ousted members had founded a party of their own. It also remains open whether, and when, Nestorovic will convene a new presidency session, the body that, according to Antonijevic, is the only one authorized under the statute to decide on the election list.