Student List Candidates Pledge: Breach Means Resignation
Ahead of the new Assembly's first session, the pledge every candidate signed was published, from party membership to resignation, while the Constitution gives MPs ownership of their mandates.
Every candidate on the “Students Win” list has signed a pledge under which they are deemed to have resigned if anything they declared proves untrue or if they fail to meet the obligations they took on. The text was published on the website of the Students in Blockade movement, along with the candidates’ names, ahead of the new National Assembly’s first session, and the media picked it up on November 3.
According to the Republic Electoral Commission, the list won 53.01 percent of the vote in the repeat election, and CRTA projects that this gives it 140 of 250 seats. How elected MPs will answer to the student plenums that nominated them has been debated on social media, and the pledge is an answer to that question, at least on paper.
What do candidates guarantee about their past?
The first part of the pledge covers what is behind them. Each candidate declares that they:
- have never gained an unlawful financial benefit in cooperation with the Serbian Progressive Party or the Socialist Party of Serbia in power;
- have never abused public office to obtain such a benefit for themselves or their family;
- have no final prison sentence longer than one year, no conviction for an offense prosecuted ex officio that carries a penalty above three years, and no ruling by a court of honor;
- have never been an MP, minister or state secretary for the current ruling coalition.
The pledge also lists 21 parties that a candidate must never have belonged to. Besides those two parties, it names the Social Democratic Party of Serbia, the Party of United Pensioners of Serbia, the Serbian Strength Movement, the Serbian Renewal Movement, the Movement of Socialists, the Serbian Radical Party, Zavetnici, United Serbia, the Greens of Serbia, the Yugoslav Left and the Serbian List, as well as smaller ones such as the People’s Peasant Party and the United Peasant Party.
A candidate also cannot be a former official of a parliamentary opposition party. The pledge spells out the positions: president, vice president, presidency member, president and member of the main board, president of a municipal, city or provincial board, and president and member of the executive board for the whole party.
What do they promise as MPs?
The second part opens with the words “in case I am elected” and covers conduct in the Assembly. An elected candidate stays, until the end of the term, in the political organization that nominated them, which means they do not switch parliamentary groups, commit crimes, violate the Constitution and laws of the Republic of Serbia, or vote for proposals that run against the program of the nominating organization. Within that program they guarantee to push for the demands of Students in Blockade and for the goals of the Social Agreement and the Minimum Program.
The penalty comes at the end of the document:
“Should any of the points I declared as a candidate for member of parliament prove untrue, or should I fail to perform the duties I said I would perform as a member of parliament, or should I depart from the goals within the program of the political organization that I guaranteed, I am deemed to have resigned on the day the untruth or the failure to perform duties is established.”
The pledge does not say who establishes the untruth or by what procedure, and that decides whether the penalty will amount to more than a political message.
Can the pledge take away an MP’s mandate?
Not by itself. The daily Danas notes that under the Serbian Constitution an MP owns their mandate and is not obliged to hand it back to the list or the citizens’ association that nominated them, and the paper links this to earlier cases of MPs who did resign in the end.
The portal Naissus.info explains the procedure. For a mandate to end by resignation, the MP must submit it in person and in writing to the National Assembly. The signature is certified after the mandate is confirmed, and the resignation is handed in within three days of certification. Changing parliamentary groups does not end a mandate on its own. If an MP refuses to resign, the same portal says, the signed pledge remains grounds only for a political demand that they do so, and the mandate ends only on the day they hand in the resignation under the legal procedure.
On the movement’s website, the students also explained how the list came about, and wrote this about the candidates:
“We do not expect them to be flawless, or to have an answer to every question. We expect something much simpler, but in this country evidently much harder: to be accountable for what they do, to listen to the people they represent, to explain their decisions, and to understand that a seat in parliament is not a reward, a privilege or the start of a political career.”
On the same page, the movement writes that the candidates were not picked by party leaders but by students, through a decision-making process built over more than a year of blockades and plenums, as reported by Resetka.
What deadlines come next?
The pledge is not the first document of its kind. According to the Financial Times, as relayed by Kurir, the students asked candidates six months ago to sign “social contracts” committing them to the movement’s values and plans. The same source says seats on the list were distributed among universities in proportion to the number of their students, and that 140 candidates earned the right to enter parliament. If someone drops out, the next person on the list replaces them.
Under that account, the candidates have 30 days to agree on who takes the seats, and another 60 days are set aside for forming a government and proposing a prime minister. Until then the pledge remains an obligation to the movement that nominated them, and its legal force depends on the procedure Naissus.info described.
