Balint Pastor: SVM Expects Two or Three Seats
In his first reaction after the election, the leader of the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians congratulated the Student List, assessed the outcome for SVM and said the party stays independent.
Balint Pastor, president of the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians (SVM), congratulated the Student List on its result in his first reaction after the election. He estimated that his party wins two or three parliamentary seats and said SVM remains an independent political party. The results are not final until the Republic Electoral Commission proclaims them, so every figure in this article is an estimate or projection by the people who announced it.
What did Pastor say about the SVM result?
He gave the statement on Sunday evening, October 25, after the polls closed. Subotica.com published it at 10:05 pm, and Radio 021 carried it on Monday at 6:22 am. Pastor thanked voters for turning out and said the vote passed in a democratic atmosphere. He also thanked all participants in the election for accepting the results, which, he said, will keep the peace that evening and in the days ahead.
He assessed his party’s performance this way:
Everyone showed, especially those who lost the election, that they are for democracy and that Serbia is a state governed by the rule of law. As for SVM, we had hoped for better results, but we survived this referendum-style atmosphere and I can say that we are the number 3 or 4 force on Serbia’s political scene, which is certainly a huge success for a small minority regional party.
Pastor added that, by his estimate, only the Student List and Aleksandar Vucic’s list will win more seats than SVM. Radio 021 also carried the statement, citing the Beta news agency.
How does this compare with the CeSID projection?
Pastor’s estimate of two or three seats fits the CeSID projection based on 96 percent of the sample, which gives SVM three seats. According to the same projection, the other lists winning seats besides the Student List, United Serbia and SVM are the Albanian Coalition with two seats, the Rasim Ljajic Ljudski list with one and the SDA of Sandzak with one. We reported the earlier SVM projections in “First estimates: SVM three seats, Albanians one or none”.
In Subotica, where Pastor made his statement, SVM won 9.48 percent of the vote, or 6,882 votes, according to Subotica.com.
What does Pastor announce for the future?
At the end of his statement he turned to the party’s future and said its political course will not change:
We will see what the future brings. We will continue to be an independent political party that consistently represents the interests of Vojvodina Hungarians, as we have done for the past 32 years. I hope the next election will be one in which more participants enter the Parliament of the Republic of Serbia.
With that, Pastor repeated that SVM continues as an independent party of Vojvodina Hungarians, as it has been for the past 32 years, by his account. The final number of seats will be known once the Republic Electoral Commission proclaims the results.
