Vučić Concedes Serbian Election to the Student List, but His Ally Brnabić Proposes the Premier

Serbia’s Student List won Sunday’s parliamentary election with 52.54 per cent of the vote in the electoral commission’s preliminary count, and Aleksandar Vučić, whose Serbian Progressive Party has governed since 2012, conceded about an hour and a half after polls closed. “The Students’ List has won,” he told supporters, the Associated Press reported.

The concession settles who has the votes. It does not settle who holds the offices. Vučić resigned the presidency on 27 September to run for prime minister, and the presidency has since been exercised by the speaker of the outgoing National Assembly, Ana Brnabić, a former prime minister and a close ally. The Serbian constitution gives the president, not the winning list, the first move in forming a government.

What did the count show?

A clear majority for the Student List on every count published so far, all of them preliminary. With 8,077 of 8,392 polling stations processed, the Republic Electoral Commission, known as RIK, put the Student List at 52.54 per cent and United Serbia, the coalition built around Vučić’s party, at 39.29 per cent, N1 reported on Monday morning, citing the FoNet agency. The Socialist Party of Serbia had 2.18 per cent. Turnout was 68.78 per cent, which N1 gives as 4,211,957 voters.

The Centre for Free Elections and Democracy (CeSID), an independent monitor, projected from a 96 per cent sample that the Student List would take 140 of the 250 seats and United Serbia 103, with the remaining seven going to minority lists. The Centre for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA), another monitor, had the Student List at 51.5 per cent, Balkan Insight reported. Vučić’s own figures, from what he called a stratified sample, were 135 to 140 seats for the Student List and about 105 for his list. A government needs 126. On CeSID’s projection the Student List would have 14 seats more than that; that is this publication’s arithmetic. The electorate figure differs between reports: AP gives 6.4 million voters and Al Jazeera about 6.5 million. RIK has not yet declared final results, and the seat figures above are projections, not allocations.

The day was not clean. CRTA said its observers recorded pressure on voters or polling-station staff at almost a third of the 500 stations it monitored, and CeSID had received about 260 reports of possible irregularities by 5 p.m., according to Al Jazeera. Polling stations abroad kept Belgrade hours, under a commission ruling contested before the vote. In his concession Vučić blamed independent media, unnamed European countries and an “American deep state”, AP reported. “This was a verification of a revolution that they carried out directly with support of various European countries,” he said, as Balkan Insight quoted him.

Who proposes the next prime minister?

The president does. Article 127 of the Constitution of Serbia provides that “a candidate for the Prime Minister shall be proposed to the National Assembly by the President of the Republic”, after the president considers the views of representatives of the elected election lists. The government is then elected if a majority of all deputies votes for it, which is 126 of 250 whoever is absent.

The president today is acting. Vučić handed over the duties on 28 September, and Brnabić “will serve as Acting President of the Republic until a new president is elected,” the government’s own announcement said. Article 120 of the constitution gives the function to an office rather than a person: it is the Chairman of the National Assembly who replaces the president, and “the Chairman of the National Assembly may replace the President of the Republic for maximum three months.” The new Assembly elects its own chairman, and on the projections above the Student List can choose who that is. Whether the acting presidency passes to that new chairman on election, before a prime minister is proposed, is not addressed in the constitution’s text, the government’s announcement or any reporting this publication has found. Reading the office-based wording of Article 120 that way is this publication’s interpretation, not a settled answer, and neither side has yet said how it reads it.

What are the deadlines?

Three, and they overlap. Under Article 101, the new Assembly’s first sitting must be held within 30 days of the declaration of the final results. Under Article 109, it is dissolved if it fails to elect a government within 90 days of being constituted. Separately, the presidential election must fall within the three-month acting period. The government announcement says the speaker must call it so that the vote takes place “no later than three months from the day the term of office” ends, and that under Article 14 of the Law on the President the term ended when the resignation was received by the National Assembly. Wikipedia’s summary of the election law puts the last possible date at 26 December and notes that the vote must be held at a weekend. No date has been called.

The calendar therefore puts a government formation, a change of Assembly chairman and a presidential campaign into the same two months. The Student List has no leader on the ballot and has not publicly named a candidate for prime minister in any report this publication has read. Its candidates are, in AP’s description, “little-known experts, athletes, farmers and artists.”

What has the other side said?

Very little about the procedure. “Based on the stratified sample, it is clear that we have lost this election,” Vučić said on election night, according to Balkan Insight, and none of the reports read for this piece record any statement from Brnabić on how she will handle the consultations Article 127 requires. Radomir Saičić, a Student List candidate, called the result a victory for the belief that Serbia can and must be different, Balkan Insight reported. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said: “We stand ready to support reforms on the rule of law, media freedom, the fight against corruption,” Al Jazeera reported.

The concession was given on Sunday. The proposal for prime minister will be signed by whoever is acting president on the day it is made.