Serbian citizens voted for the president of the state and all 250 members of parliament on 3 April, with turnout estimated to be higher than in the 2020 parliamentary elections.
Voting at the 8,267 ballot stations where 6,502,307 citizens had the right to vote ended at 8 pm on 3 April. Elections for the assemblies of Belgrade, Bor and 12 municipalities across Serbia were also held on the same day.
Independent observer missions and opposition parties reported numerous irregularities during voting, such as bribery, manipulation of ballots, and violations of the secrecy of voting.
According to the Republic Electoral Commission, voter turnout by 6 pm was 50.82%. The commission said that the overall turnout could be between 58% and 60%, much higher than the 48.8% in the 2020 parliamentary elections. But, in a precedent in Serbia’s election history, on Sunday evening, the commission stated it would not announce the turnout or any partial results until Monday.
The elections were monitored by more than 4,000 observers from the domestic CRTA and CeSID non-governmental organisations, a European Parliament delegation, the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, and the European network of election monitoring organisations.
Nineteen parties took part in the parliamentary polls. Among them, there are eight parties representing national minorities, for which the election threshold for entering the parliament does not apply. The other 11 parties must win at least 3% of the votes to get into the parliament. Ten stand a chance of crossing the election threshold.
Among the ten relevant non-minority groupings, two coalitions are led by the strongest parties of the ruling bloc, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) and Ivica Dacic’s Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). Only the two coalitions are expected to cross the election threshold.
Three opposition groups can be labelled as pro-European. The leading opposition coalition is United Serbia, headed by Dragan Djilas’ Freedom and Justice Party and Vuk Jeremic’s People’s party. The second one is the Let’s Go, People alliance gathered around the Social Democratic Party, led by former Serbian President Boris Tadic, while the third is the green–left We Must coalition.
The remaining five factions are right-wing or extreme nationalists and populists.
Like in the presidential election, there is no uncertainty in the parliamentary polls, where a convincing win for the ruling majority rallied around Vucic is expected.
Among the eight presidential candidates, only three verbally support Serbia’s European integration. Besides President Vucic, these are the candidate of the United Serbia coalition, Zdravko Ponos, and Biljana Stojkovic from the ‘We must’ coalition. But all of them are against Serbia’s NATO membership and Kosovo’s independence.
Twelve parties are running in the Belgrade election, where almost a third of Serbia’s population lives in Belgrade – two million out of less than seven million.
The election campaign has taken place in the shadow of the war in Ukraine and the economic consequences of that crisis. This will probably affect the outcome of the elections since other policy themes such as the environment, the state of democracy and the rule of law have been less prominent in the campaign,
