Serbia’s Elections Under the Magnifying Glass
On April 4 it was announced that Serbia’s authoritarian pro-Kremlin president, Aleksandar Vučić, won a landslide victory in the country’s general election. Meanwhile, Vučić’s Serbian Progressive party (SNS) won 42.9% of the vote in the parliamentary election – just short of a majority, meaning the SNS will form a coalition government.
These results come after independent observers uncovered a series of irregularities and incidents associated with elections. The Serbian president and government denied manipulating the process, but evidence suggests this is far from true.
Civil society organizations, gathered around the Three Freedoms Platform, coordinated their work during the election campaign and identified a number of irregularities and abuses that seriously jeopardize the integrity of elections in Serbia. According to their report “Elections Under the Magnifying Glass”, published on 31 March 2022, “Irregularities can be noticed in every segment of the election process.” From changes to election legislation to “numerous models of pressure, blackmail and vote-buying by the ruling parties, including gross misuse of public resources and institutions.”
See below an excerpt from the report detailing the role of media capture in undermining fair and free elections in Serbia:
POLITICAL OPTIONS IN MEDIA
In the period before the formal announcement of the parliamentary elections on February 15, 2022, the ruling parties had a huge advantage in presenting themselves on television with a national frequency, through all news programs. About 85% of the time on these televisions was dedicated to government representatives, while the opposition had 15%.
When one looks at the tonality of reporting, the difference is even more drastic. While the opposition is represented negatively in a third of all articles about it, the government has almost no negative articles about itself. This difference narrowed during the election campaign due to the introduction of special election programs, where opposition representatives were given the opportunity to visit. However, there was no change in the regular news program, so the representation of the opposition was still around 15%.
Further analysis, civil society representatives noted that this small part of the time is dedicated to the opposition, mostly reserved for extreme right-wing parties that clearly avoid criticism of the government and whose opposition status is very unclear (moreover, in many local governments are in coalition with SNS).
The tone of reporting for these parties is mostly neutral or positive, while the representatives of undoubtedly opposition options – “United for Serbia” and “Moramo” - were reported negatively. Very similar percentages were observed when presenting presidential candidates on televisions with a national frequency.
Aleksandar Vučić takes up 85% of the time and there are no negative reports about him. On the other hand, the main opponent, Zdravko Ponos, had 4% of the time, of which 72% were negative contributions. A special form of misuse of public resources and functions is the functionary campaign. Government officials had 76% more activity in the first month of the campaign than in the same period a year ago.
The most common events in the election campaign were the opening of various facilities, the start of work, the signing of contracts or memoranda, visits to schools, hospitals, courts and the like. And almost all dailies in Serbia (except Danas and Nova) run an open campaign for Aleksandar Vučić and the ruling party, while most of them also run fierce defamation campaigns against opposition representatives.
FINANCING THE CAMPAIGN
The organization Transparency Serbia (TS) observed the transparency of campaign expenses, using the “TraFiKa” methodology, which includes both legally required and voluntary transparency of election participants. All electoral lists and candidates had scores between 1 and 2.3 on a scale of 1 to 5, which practically means that citizens have almost no data on campaign financing. At the same time, this small number of positive evaluations is mainly related to the non-financial parts of transparent business, such as publishing data on profiles on social networks that are used for the campaign.
According to TS, the legislation in Serbia still does not allow for transparency in spending money in election campaigns, and almost all proposals of this organization and other CSOs were rejected in the phase of the latest amendments to the law. The campaign itself shows a huge difference in the invested funds between the ruling SNS and opposition parties.
The SNS is convincingly ahead in the invested money in all types of media, while the opposition is mostly on social networks. In the first three weeks of the campaign, according to the results of the TS survey, only the SNS had pre-election videos on television. There is a general trend of greater investment in advertising on social networks, which is less legally regulated, and which opens space for various types of financial abuse in the campaign.
‘Elections Under the Magnifying Glass’ used data collected and materials produced by the following civil society organizations: CRTA, Civic Initiatives, Transparency Serbia, BIRODI, the Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia, the Youth Initiative for Human Rights and the Women Leadership Academy.
