Student List Launches Republika Srpska Tour From Bijeljina

The working group “Student in Every Village,” part of the Student List campaign, began a five day tour through seven cities in Republika Srpska and Brcko District today, September 22. The first stop is Bijeljina, where list representatives are talking with residents about the campaign’s platform ahead of Serbia’s upcoming elections. It is the campaign’s first outing outside Serbia’s borders, into an area where voters eligible to cast ballots in Serbian elections live.

According to an announcement posted on Instagram, the working group heads in two directions tomorrow, September 23, toward Brcko and Trebinje at the same time. Doboj and Visegrad follow on Thursday, September 24, then Banja Luka and Bratunac on Friday, September 25, before the tour wraps up in Zvornik on Saturday, September 26. All three outlets that reported the schedule listed it identically.

The tour’s purpose is to reach residents of the villages surrounding each of the seven cities, not just the city centers themselves. According to Danas, the “Student in Every Village” caravan, counting its earlier run inside Serbia, has visited more than a thousand villages and towns so far and knocked on more than 30,000 doors.

“We are talking with our people, spreading the story of students who are winning. See you there,” the “Student in Every Village” working group said in its Instagram post.

N1 and SNM reported the same message in a slightly different phrasing, “We will talk with our people,” while Danas used the present tense, “We are talking with our people.” The content is identical; the difference comes down to how each outlet transcribed the Instagram post.

The caravan’s arrival in Republika Srpska and Brcko District follows our earlier report that Arnautovic is demanding that Serbs from Republika Srpska not vote in Serbia. The Student List is thus stepping directly into territory where the voting rights of the diaspora and of voters from neighboring areas have already been a point of dispute. So far there has been no reaction from Republika Srpska’s authorities, and no one from its institutions has commented on the campaign’s arrival.

The last stop of the five day tour is Zvornik on Saturday, September 26, when the caravan returns to the right bank of the Drina after covering six cities in two days, each with two parallel routes.

For the election cycle now underway, this kind of fieldwork follows a different logic than rallies held in Serbia’s own cities. Voters from Republika Srpska and Brcko District who cast ballots in Serbian elections are rarely the target of direct canvassing by any party list, which makes this tour mainly a test of how many votes such an approach can bring in from outside Serbia itself, in a setting where the question of who is allowed to vote in Belgrade has already produced a dispute with Arnautovic.