Vucic Concedes to a Student Movement Without a Final Count
Aleksandar Vucic has conceded Serbia’s parliamentary election to the leaderless student list that grew out of two years of protest, telling supporters: “We still do not have final results… it is clear that we have lost these elections.” The electoral commission put turnout at 64.9% two hours before polls closed, the highest in decades.
He conceded before the count finished, and that matters: the electoral commission has published no seat figures at all, so every number in circulation — projections of 134 to 141 seats for the students against 103 to 106 for his party, on a threshold of 126 — is a projection rather than a result. He conceded on his own party’s sample. The turnout figure is the commission’s preliminary count to six o’clock local time; one monitor put it at 67.6% an hour later. A high turnout was expected to favour the students, and did. The movement has no leader by design: its 250 candidates were chosen by university faculty assemblies and none had held office, so the question is whether a structure built to protest can form a government. The name circulating for prime minister is Dejan Soskic, a former governor of the national bank, who stood twenty-seventh on the list. He called the snap election himself, after two years of protest triggered by the collapse of a railway station canopy at Novi Sad which killed sixteen. Barred from a third presidential term, he had stood down to run for prime minister. Celebrations erupted in Belgrade as he conceded.