Serb ethnic minority MP Milorad Pupovac on Tuesday dismissed accusations by the civil initiative proposing the election law referendum, which claimed that there were pressures from the ruling coalition and the opposition against the referendum petition.

Pupovac dismissed the initiative’s representatives’ claims about “manipulations by the political elites” with the aim to prevent the referendum from taking place.

The initiative proposed scaling down minority MP voting rights to exclude them from voting on the state budget and government composition, as well as increasing preferential voting on party slates and decreasing the number of MPs from the existing 150 to a maximum of 120.

“I don’t see a campaign by the government, the ruling coalition or other political parties in the parliament,” he told reporters after representatives of ethnic minorities held a meeting with Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic about the implementation of minority operational programmes.

Pupovac said that, unlike the initiative’s representatives, no political party or government representative was pursuing any campaign or making too many comments on the referendum.

He said President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic “got involved in the story before things have matured and got more involved in the matter than she said she would.”

The president has said that by signing the referendum petition, the people have shown they wanted changes to election legislation, and that their will should be respected.