SRCE Backs Student List Candidate for President
Serbia Center deputy leader Mihailo Brkic says SRCE will stand behind the Student List candidate in the presidential election, and that the party stays outside parliament.
The Serbia Center party (SRCE) will support the Student List candidate in the upcoming presidential election. Deputy leader Mihailo Brkic said so today, adding that the election should be held before the end of the year.
Brkic made the statement to the daily Danas while discussing the resignation of party leader Zdravko Ponos after the election result. He described the Student List as the winner of the parliamentary vote. We reported yesterday on Ponos stepping down from the head of SRCE, and today we know what the party intends to do when voters choose a president.
What will SRCE do in the presidential election?
According to Brkic, the party’s position is to back the Student List candidate. The statement as reported does not name that candidate, nor does it give an exact voting date.
That position implies SRCE will not field its own candidate, which is how Kurir headlines it. The conclusion should be kept apart from the statement, though: in what was reported, Brkic did not explicitly say the party would have no candidate of its own. He said it supports the Student List candidate.
How does Brkic see Ponos’s resignation?
Brkic said that in European democratic political practice, resigning after a poor election result is regarded as a normal act of political and moral responsibility. He assessed Ponos’s move this way:
“Zdravko Ponos’s decision to resign is therefore the act of a responsible and moral man. What was expected of us in Serbia Center should become the norm in Serbian public life as a whole, namely that politics is practiced by people who have the moral qualities mentioned.”
In this way Brkic presented the resignation as something the party expects of its people, and which, in his words, should apply to the entire political scene.
What lies ahead for a party outside parliament?
The list on which the Freedom and Justice Party (SSP) and SRCE ran finished below the threshold, so SRCE operates as an extra-parliamentary party in this term. Brkic said that does not change its goals:
“As an extra-parliamentary party, we will keep fighting resolutely for the continuation and acceleration of European integration and for Serbia’s membership in the EU. That is the goal that was one of the reasons for founding the party three years ago, and before it the political movement.”
Asked how the lack of budget funds would affect that fight, Brkic replied that his comrades are used to working both as a movement and as an extra-parliamentary party. The organization, he explained, was formed by people with enviable careers for whom politics is not a profession.
Two questions remain open: who the Student List candidate is that SRCE will back, and when exactly the presidential election will be held.
