Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic won a second term in office and his ruling party headed for an election victory on Sunday, putting the leader on track to extend his coalition’s decadelong grip on power, according to an early third-party count.
Vucic secured about 59% of the vote in the presidential contest, more than enough to avoid a second-round runoff ballot, according to a partial count taken by the nongovernmental Center for Free Elections and Democracy. His Progressive Party-led bloc won about 43% of the vote, while a coalition of center-left opposition parties running as United for Serbia’s Victory took 13%.
The result suggests Vucic will be able to consolidate his dominance since his party first took over the government a decade ago in the nation of 7 million. A largely fragmented opposition has struggled to challenge the Progressive-led coalition and assailed Vucic for increasingly concentrating power into his hands.
In neighboring Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s party took a commanding early lead in elections there, dimming the chances of a six-party opposition alliance to block him from a fourth consecutive term.
The Serbian leader is likely to form a majority in Serbia’s 250-seat legislature with his Socialist allies, even though his bloc’s parliamentary result fell short of preelection polls showing that the Progressive-led bloc could win more than 50% of ballots.
Vucic, 52, has struck a balanced position between Russia, a traditional Serbian ally, and the European Union, which has piled pressure on Belgrade to adopt its raft of sanctions targeting the Kremlin. Although Serbia condemned Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in a United Nations resolution, Vucic has said it’s not in the country’s interest to join in with EU penalties.
The election campaign has been overshadowed by the war, though the opposition has failed to gain traction in a country with divided sympathies between Moscow and the European Union, which Serbia aspires to join. A poll last month showed that half of Serbs want their country to remain neutral, though of those to chose a side, more expressed a preference for Russia.
The invasion of Ukraine has also deflected Vucic’s opponents focus on corruption allegations in Serbia and environmental issues that rose to prominence after a wave of protests last year against pollution. The Progressives have replaced their initial campaign slogan highlighting economic achievements with “Peace. Security. Vucic.”
Once a hard-line nationalist in a party that called for a Greater Serbia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Vucic has moderated his views on his path to power. The president has stuck with Serbia’s ambitions to join the EU and carried out economic reforms that have been endorsed by the International Monetary Fund.
Vucic’s coalition won the last parliamentary contest in 2020 in a landslide, collecting more than 60% of the vote, after opposition parties largely boycotted, calling campaign conditions and Vucic’s media dominance unfair.
The Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability, a watchdog organization for democratic standards, said its representatives had noted irregularities at as many as 12% of polling stations in Serbia, citing a sampling, citing a sampling.
