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naraburns  nihil supernum  11mo ago (text post)   1449 thread views

Transnational Thursday for December 21, 2023

After thirty weeks as @Soriek's passion project, Transnational Thursday is getting added to the auto-post bot. But it hasn't been added to the bot yet, I think, so I'm posting it this week, with apologies to anyone whose plans I've mussed!

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Serbia

I previously covered the Serbian Progressive Party being forced to call snap elections after popular discontent with two mass shootings. SNP undertook a mass gun buyback in response to the shooting in hopes of shoring up support, and either it worked really well, or the election was shady, or what. Either way, they did fine. They hasn’t restored their pre-2022 supermajority, and their coalition partner the socialist party lost half their seats, but the SNS still handily breezed by the opposition parties (they even won in Belgrade), leaving Aleksander Vucic safely maintaining his decade plus hold on the country (currently he is in the technically symbolic Presidential role rather than Prime Minister, but in reality he is still the leader of the party):

[Vucic’s] Serbian Progressive Party, or SNS, won 47% of the vote, according to a near-final count.

Opposition parties under the Serbia Against Violence (SPN) banner were well behind with around 23%.

But they claimed electoral fraud favouring the government, and called a protest for Monday evening.

If confirmed, the results will likely mean the SNS has won more than half of the 250 seats in the National Assembly…

In a statement, SPN claimed electoral fraud. The coalition said: "More than 40,000 non-residents were brought to Belgrade"... The International Election Observation Mission said in a statement that "serious irregularities, including vote-buying and ballot box stuffing were observed"...

Local observers reported various irregularities on Sunday, including voters being bussed in from Bosnia-Herzegovina to vote in Belgrade.

The CRTA observer mission gave details of attempted ballot-rigging in a number of polling stations.

Significant protests happened on Monday, and the international response has been skeptical:

Stefan Schennach, a member of the Austrian Parliament and the head of the Council of Europe’s election observers, addressed the cameras. Not mincing his words, he said it had not been a fair election: “The victory in Belgrade was stolen from the opposition.” A report by observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) followed, spelling out several irregularities.

The next strike to Vucic’s hopes came from across the Atlantic. On Tuesday, United States Department of State spokesman Matthew Miller asked Serbia to investigate the irregularities, urging it to “work with the OSCE to address these concerns that have been raised”.

Meanwhile, the only international leaders to congratulate Vucic on his party’s victory were fellow strongmen: Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Azerbaijan’s Ilhan Aliyev. Even the Serbian president’s nominal allies whom he often proudly claims as personal friends, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, had lower-ranking officials send the congratulations.

The big question now is what will happen with Kosovo. Tensions have been high, but Serbia does want to join the European Union, and the EU sure isn’t going to be thrilled with a dodgy election keeping a quasi-autocrat in power; there will be a lot of pressure to continue the halting normalization process with Kosovo.

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