The president of the ‘Black and White’ (Crno na Belo) movement in Serbia, law professor Vladimir Vuletić, said he would file criminal charges against Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić, for what he described as “bribing voters” ahead of the 3 April elections.
Vučić said in an interview last weekend that if his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) won the upcoming elections, he would make sure that young people in Serbia receive another €100 of state aid.
Serbia’s government has already decided to give €100 to people between 16 and 29 before the elections.
“In his bestial campaign against the last institutes of freedom of choice and freedom of vote, Vučić violates Article 156 of the Criminal Code, promising a part of the citizens a bribe in two instalments. He gives them the first part before the elections, publicly promising they will get the second part if he wins the upcoming elections,“ Vuletić told the independent Danas daily.
The Black and White movement was founded in 2021 with the same name as a coalition in Montenegro.
Earlier, pollical observers told N1 that Vučić’s move was an illegal attempt to influence the voters.
They added that people from 16 to 29 years of age were not interested in politics and did not belong to Vučić’s voters and accused the Serbian president of trying to attract them with a “marketing pre-election move and post-election promise; 100 + 100 euros for their votes is for criminal prosecution.”
According to Goran Radosavljević, a professor at the Faculty of Economics, Vučić has already spent nearly two billion euros from the republican budget to buy votes ahead of the upcoming elections in April.
Radosavljević told the Beta news agency that the Serbian government had spent about €1.4 billion from the budget since March 2020 on one-off assistance to various categories of citizens.
In his words, to this must be added about €100 million in aid for young people aged 16 to 29, the distribution of which is currently underway, and another €100 million, which were announced by the president “if he wins the election in April”, plus some €300 million announced as aid for pensioners.
All this leads us to, probably not the final figure of €1.9 billion, says the professor. He noted that these funds were not planned in the budget.
Radosavljević pointed out that the granting of money was almost always announced at press conferences by the President of Serbia, who has no constitutional authority to deal with such issues.
According to the scholar, the funding is being added to the updated budget, but the dynamic has been such that the respective law for updating the budget had to be changed each time the president comes up with a new idea.
According to the professor, it would be more rational to leave this law open and only at the end of the year, to sum up, “everything that the president has distributed to the citizens.”
Radosavlević also points out that not only is this money not planned in the budget law, but the country simply does not have it.
“We had to contract additional debt so that it would not turn out that the president was lying to the citizens. So for these €1.9 billion, we had to go into additional debt, and we will repay this debt with interest”, said the professor.
Radosavlević notes that for every €100 “we received from the president”, each Serbian citizen will return €110 in the next 10 years. He added it would be more appropriate to advertise these measures on public television immediately after the cash loan ads.
Early parliamentary and regular presidential elections are expected in Serbia on 3 April. Human rights activists, opposition politicians and observers point out that during Vučić’s rule in Serbia, there was a severe departure from democratic values and the rule of law.
