Vucic: No Violence or Power Grab on Election Night
President Vucic said ahead of Serbia's October 25 election that voters should not fear election night, since the result will be decided by counted votes, not warnings of unrest.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, the lead candidate on the “Aleksandar Vucic, United Serbia” list, sent citizens a video message on his Instagram account @avucic on Friday evening, September 18. In it, he argued there is no reason to fear the upcoming election night. The message comes a month and a half before Serbia’s snap parliamentary election, scheduled for October 25.
In the message, Vucic said citizens should be worried about something else entirely, not election night itself.
“What they should be worried about is whose hands Serbia’s future will end up in,” Vucic said.
The president then explained why he does not expect trouble when the votes are counted, in a sentence that by this morning had become the most quoted part of his message.
“As for that night, well, you know, the votes get counted, and once they’re counted, we’ll know the results. This idea that they’d do it that very night, if they could have, they would have toppled us on March 15 too, and April 15, and May 15, and June 15, and the 15th of every single month. Those are fairy tales for small children. No one is going to get beaten, no one is going to get toppled. So put that aside, that scarecrow trick doesn’t work on us, they can try it on someone else.”
The dates the president listed, March 15, April 15, May 15 and June 15, mark months in which, according to him, “they,” as he calls them, had earlier failed to topple the government despite announcing they would. With that list, Vucic argued that October 25, election day, will in his view bring no different outcome on that front.
This is not the first message Vucic has sent to voters in recent days. We previously reported that the president announced his campaign would start on Saturday and that he would resign once he returns from New York. Friday’s message follows the same line, but it is the first time he has directly addressed warnings of unrest on election night itself, a topic that has surfaced in recent days among parts of the opposition and non parliamentary circles.
That same day, after a meeting of the Carpathian Initiative, Vucic also answered reporters’ questions about a leaked phone exchange involving Vesna Medenica, the former president of Montenegro’s Supreme Court, published a day earlier. According to media reports, the exchange claims that Ilija Srdanovic, the top candidate on the Students’ List, is close to former Montenegrin president Milo Djukanovic and serves as his physician. Vucic said the exchange is authentic.
“Of course all of it is original and everything in it is true, I just want to tell you it’s not from ‘Sky’ communications, as it’s being described, but from the actual investigation by Montenegrin authorities into the Vesna Medenica case and the crimes of Ms. Medenica and her son. That’s where it comes from. Otherwise, the communication is authentic and accurate,” the president said.
He explained that, when it comes to the case itself, he is more concerned by the conduct of parts of Serbia’s own security services than by the content of the exchange, but he declined to go into further detail, saying he considers it an internal matter. Asked to comment on Srdanovic’s statements about him personally, Vucic said he does not intend to respond to insults.
The president then added that, in his view, people can see for themselves who stands behind certain electoral lists and how, and that he sees no need to say more about it until his own list’s results and platform put it clearly ahead of the other contenders in the race.
A little more than five weeks remain until the snap parliamentary election. Whether Vucic’s message about a peaceful election night stays just that, a message, or is followed by concrete moves from his list toward the other participants in the campaign, remains an open question until October 25, when the votes are counted.
