Green European Journal: Allegations of election fraud sparked huge demonstrations in Serbia in December. How has the situation evolved since?  

Dobrica Veselinović: The protests broke out after reports from NGOs and election observation missions showed that the official election results, especially in Belgrade, were rigged in favour of President Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). The mobilisation hasn’t stopped since then; demonstrations will continue. It was a tactical choice not to organise protests every day, but to do it regularly and in different places. In addition to that, we are resorting to the legal means available: we are filing legal cases, including to the constitutional court of Serbia. 

Evidence of fraud aside, would you acknowledge that Vučić’s party did better than expected in the elections? 

The election fraud was sophisticated because it happened on different levels. They [the SNS] brought to Belgrade people from other Serbian cities or from Bosnia, and registered them as residents so that they could vote; they voted on behalf of citizens who never turn up to vote; they issued new ID cards so that SNS activists could vote in more than one place; some of these ID cards had the names of dead people on them. Vučić’s supporters did this across many polling stations, adding 20 or 30 votes in each, so that it would not be easily noticed.

Protests are normal, but not so frequently and on such a scale as in Serbia – even Vučić knows that.

We are demanding an independent observation mission to look into the voting system. The system contains metadata that can prove who changed what and when. We first asked these questions through the Serbian law on access to public information: we asked how many people were registered at the last minute in each municipality, how many ID cards were issued. The interior minister eventually answered that no document can prove those things, which is ridiculous: everything is recorded in the voting database.  

But as of today, we don’t know the extent and scope of the operation, and this makes it impossible to assess the true result of the elections.  

How did Serbia’s EU allies react? 

The German foreign ministry issued a statement saying that the elections weren’t fair and democratic, and that they should be repeated. There was also a debate in the EU Parliament based on the preliminary findings of the OSCE report, which showed that the official results do not reflect the will of the people; now we are expecting more concrete action from the EU Parliament resolution on 8 February. 

Dragan Đilas, former mayor of Belgrade and a member of Serbia Against Violence, recently described the EU’s relationship with Vučić as “nakedly transactional”: the EU is happy with Vučić playing the pro-Russian nationalist at home, as long as he sits at the negotiating table in Brussels and ships weapons to Ukraine. Would you call this a pragmatic or short-sighted strategy? 

We need to put this into context. Vučić became prime minister a decade ago and has been president since 2017. During this time, many things happened. There were political changes in Brussels, the COVID-19 pandemic (a time in which nobody wanted to mess with politics), and the boycott of the 2020 parliamentary elections by many opposition parties in Serbia. All these circumstances created a perfect storm for Vučić to hold on to power and present himself to Serbia’s western partners, the EU and the US, as the only game in town. The opposition was very weak; only recently it gained a little traction. Now we have won nearly one million votes, over 20 per cent of the total – the best result in more than ten years. So the EU is starting to talk about us as a plausible ally. Of course, there are also forces inside the EU who consider Vučić a valuable ally – Orbán’s Hungary and Poland’s previous government, for example. Authoritarian leaders need one another. 

However, the idea that Vučić will provide social, political, and geopolitical stability is misleading. Without a broad democratic dialogue, Serbia cannot build a consensus about hot issues such as Kosovo, ties with Russia, EU accession, and NATO membership. 

What will happen with the normalisation of relations between Serbia and Kosovo? 2023 was marked by positive steps forward but also worrying outbreaks of violence.  

There is a huge question mark around Kosovo, because there is no honest and open debate in Serbia on the matter. The entire process has been monopolised by Vučić, who’s using it as a tool for staying in power. For my generation, Kosovo is a reality over which we had no say. But we share a common history and similar problems. So the question is whether we want to talk to each other, whether we allow people to travel freely and meet each other, whether we recognise each other’s diplomas, whether there is bilateral trade, and so on. If we allow progress to happen on those fronts, it’s not important anymore whether Serbia officially recognises Kosovo as a country or not. 

We need to tackle common challenges together, not just with Kosovo but with all the countries of former Yugoslavia. We are all affected by issues such as depopulation or environmental degradation. We are all connected; rivers and air pollution have no borders, and the same applies to social issues. Belgrade has many more things in common with people in Pristina – on air quality, public transportation, urban development – than with, say, Stockholm.  

You came to politics through municipalist and environmentalist grassroots organising. Do you think that change in Serbia will come from the streets or from within the institutions? 

It’s clear that something is not working in society. Protests are normal, but not so frequently and on such a scale as in Serbia – even Vučić knows that. And yet nothing changes. For example, there was a huge mobilisation effort against [the urban development project] Belgrade on Water, in which people demanded to know who demolished the waterfront buildings at night, and asked for transparency from the institutions. Yet neither of these basic demands has been met. The same happened following the two mass shootings last spring. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across Serbia, but no dialogue emerged on what is wrong in our society, on where that violence came from.  

The situation is similar within the institutions. One million people voted for the opposition, and yet the opposition does not govern a single municipality, no matter how small. All are ruled by the SNS.  

So we find ourselves at a crossroads: one option is to try all our political options within the institutions, even though we can achieve limited results; the other is to drive societal change from outside the institutions. This second way is about building coalitions with civil society, workers’ unions, and grassroots groups around specific issues, and then taking to the streets.  

I am convinced that change needs to come from both sides. The institutions have the potential to absorb some of the demands of the protests, to provide an answer to people’s problems. Opposition to Vučić within the institutions can turn pressure coming from the streets into political decisions.  

Violence has deep roots, and it piles up until it erupts. If we don’t address it, it will erupt again. 

The protests following the two mass shootings last spring gave rise to Serbia Against Violence, the opposition coalition that ran for the elections in December. Is the battle against violence more pressing than the one for the environment? 

The most pressing political priority remains climate change; but it is connected with violence. What we are doing to our environment is the same as what we are doing to each other. If we become more gentle, more caring, then we also start protecting nature. When we are protesting against violence, we are talking about physical violence in the streets, but also about the violence of corruption within the institutions, violence against nature, and domestic violence against women.  

For us, this also means addressing the violence of the past. The young man who shot nine people dead in Mladenovac last May used weapons that came from the wars in the Balkans. Violence has deep roots, and it piles up until it erupts. If we don’t address it, it will erupt again. 

How has environmental mobilisation in Serbia evolved over the last years?  

If you look at how most environmental movements started, you will notice that they were all reactive. It is evident even from their names, like “Do Not Let Belgrade Drown” or “Protect the Rivers of Stara Planina”. They were all against something, opposing a project or protecting a natural habitat. Now, there is an ongoing shift – which is very important for us as a green-left party – towards a more far-reaching notion of environmentalism, a radical political proposal that goes beyond what we don’t want. This alternative vision is about access to water and housing as human rights, about putting in place environmental protection at a macro level, setting more ambitious goals for the energy transition, and so on. We now feel that we can achieve these things through political mobilisation.  

What’s next for the Serbia Against Violence alliance? 

In the very short term, there’s a question of what we do with our electoral mandates. There will be a constitutive session of both the national parliament and the Belgrade city council in  February. Then we will have to make a decision on the upcoming municipal elections in June. How can we mobilise voters who have witnessed electoral fraud, and how can we run for elections when we know they will be rigged? This is why we are demanding an independent international investigation into the December election and a mission to fix the transparency issues, so that when people go to vote, they can be confident that their will is respected.  

The alliance itself is more pro-democratic than based on a specific political programme. Our goal is to restore a level playing field so that we can then confront each other on the basis of different political proposals. Right now, the differences between the parties of the alliance are a source of strength and unity.