Serbia: Vucic declares election victory, voter turnout 49 percent

NEWS 22.06.202000:24
Tanjug/Zoran Žestić

Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia's President, said his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) won some two million votes on Sunday and added that no one ever had that result in the country, N1 reported.

 After declaring the victory, he said that in forming a new government will be formed with people from the lists that did not pass the three percent threshold.

Asked by an N1 reporter was the new parliament without the opposition, the one he wanted, he said he was only interested in the list he headed.

Vucic denied that SPS hid behind his name. “I’m the least respectable and the most attacked man whose family members are criminals, as people at your television (N1) had been saying. But, people did not trust you.”

“We won everywhere where we were losing, in every place, abroad, overwhelmingly, in Republika Srpska (a Serb-dominated entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina) we won 90 percent of the votes,” Vucic told reporters in the SNS headquarter, receiving loud applause from the party officials.

SNS officials celebrated the victory with trumpet music and Serbia’s national dance.

Tanjug/Zoran Žestić

 Vucic added that Serbia would have to work “faster, more powerfully and stronger” on its way to the European Union.

“We have to continue with reforms, but not by fawning to those who fuss about everything. We will safeguard the friends who were with us when it was difficult during the coronavirus epidemic,” Vucic said in an apparent reference to the West and China and Russia respectively.

In the meantime, independent observers said the turnout was 49 percent, while SNS said it was 50.2 percent.    

Olivér Várhelyi, European Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement, tweeted Sunday was an important day for Serbia and was looking forward to working with a new government.

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