Transparency Serbia: Election campaign dominated by Vucic

Presenting the Transparency Serbia report on the campaign for the June 2 elections, Nenadic told a media conference that the new campaign began without resolving key issues from the previous campaign in terms of cost control, and new forms of potential abuses and violations of regulations were observed.

Research coordinator Zlatko Minic said the specificity of these elections and campaign can best be described by the slogan “call locally, scare globally.”

What was observed from May 7 to 30 was a complete domination of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), that is, of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic personally, said Minic.

Vucic topped all election tickets and a discourse was imposed that local issues and who would be mayor were not important, but that the president was the one who would save Serbia and Serbians from global threats, said Minic, alluding to the UN Resolution on designating July 11 as the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica.

He said that the campaign spoke of how the opposition fought for seats, yet that “Serbia and Serbian is what is important,” so there was insistence on Belgrade having a Serbian mayor.

The other major topic were national investments, namely Expo 2027, and that everything that is to be built would be done within this project.

Minic explained that Transparency also monitored the front pages of 13 dailies, on which Vucic appeared 169 times, in 89 percent of cases in a positive context, and Go-Change initiative campaigns director and Belgrade mayoral candidate Savo Manojlovic 18 times, two-thirds of which in a negative context.

Transparency Serbia told a media conference that all television stations with national broadcasting licenses published price lists for political advertising this time, while not all cable television stations did so.