European Serbia gathers signatures, list to RIK Sunday
The SSP, SRCE and Solidarity coalition has collected the signatures it needs, though some voices within SRCE are still pushing to withdraw the list in favor of the Student List.
The European Serbia coalition, made up of Marinika Tepic and Zdravko Ponos, the Freedom and Justice Party (SSP), Serbia Centre (SRCE) and the Solidarity movement, has collected the number of signatures it needs for its candidate list in the snap parliamentary election. According to the Beta news agency, citing sources from the top of the coalition, the signatures and the list will be handed over to the Republic Election Commission (RIK) over the weekend, most likely on Sunday, September 20. The exact number of signatures collected has not yet been made public, and the law requires a minimum of 10,000 voter signatures to submit a list.
A source from the coalition’s leadership also denied reports by some portals claiming that SRCE’s leadership would use its meeting that same day to discuss the possibility of not running in the election at all.
“Our coalition is definitely running in the election. Reports by certain portals claiming that today’s session of the Srbija Centar party presidency will discuss running, or not running, in the election are inaccurate. The topic of today’s presidency session is finalizing the order of candidates on the pro-European coalition’s parliamentary list,” a source from the coalition’s leadership told Beta.
The SRCE presidency met in the afternoon on September 18, and according to a source from the party speaking to Nova.rs, the actual topic of the meeting was only the order of candidates, not whether to run at all.
“The session is this afternoon. We have no doubt that we will run in the election, so there will be no discussion about participation. The topic will be the list of parliamentary candidates, since we have already collected the signatures,” a source from SRCE told Nova.rs.
Behind these denials lie several days of pressure from within the party itself. City boards in Leskovac and Krusevac asked SRCE’s leadership on September 15 to withdraw from the race and support the Student List, “Students Win.” The Leskovac board said in a statement that it expects the party to pull out, and offered to put SRCE’s resources and people at the disposal of monitoring the election process in coordination with the students.
“We expect Srbija Centar to withdraw and support the Student List,” the SRCE Leskovac city board said in its statement.
The withdrawal question gained new traction after the “People’s Serbia” coalition (the National Movement of Serbia, New Face of Serbia and Ecological Uprising) submitted its own list and then immediately withdrew it in favor of the students. SRCE leader Zdravko Ponos answered the question briefly on September 16, sharing an N1 article about a possible withdrawal on X with a single word: “Won’t.” The same day, Solidarity leader Goran Jesic weighed in as well.
“We’re pushing on,” Jesic wrote on X.
Internal resistance to the joint run with SSP has already cost SRCE part of its local infrastructure. The party’s representative for Vrnjacka Banja, Vesna Nedeljkovic, left SRCE, citing her disagreement with the coalition with Dragan Djilas and the way the decision was made, without consulting the membership. Srpske Novine previously reported on a similar situation in the article “Ponos: SRCE Stays in the Race, Local Board Falls Apart in Uzice,” which described the collapse of the party’s local board there.
Ponos himself, speaking on N1 television, said these elections are not just a chance to remove the SNS government, but also a choice about whether Serbia keeps a multi-party parliament. He added that the Student List, as he put it, is not a political party, so refusing the party’s offer does not protect pluralism, but undermines it.
The list’s leaders, Marinika Tepic and Ponos, as well as Djilas, who tops the list, had themselves earlier signed in support of the very list they are running on. With the formal handover of signatures to RIK, most likely on Sunday, the dispute over whether European Serbia stays independent or joins the Student List effectively becomes a closed question, at least until RIK reviews and certifies the list.
