DS asks Novi Pazar who certified European Serbia signatures

The Democratic Party (DS) said on October 7 that it has sent the Novi Pazar City Administration a freedom of information request, seeking to establish the circumstances in which 519 signatures backing the “European Serbia - Marinika Tepic - Zdravko Ponos” electoral list were certified through that office.

It is an open clash between two opposition parties in the middle of an election campaign. The DS is not asking the local administration for an opinion but for paperwork: who requested what, who approved it, and who certified how many signatures.

What exactly does the DS ask the City Administration for?

The party requested documentation showing:

• who asked for city certifying officials to be engaged
• how many of them there were
• where and when they certified signatures
• how many signatures each of them certified

It also wants to know whether City Administration officials certified signatures on September 12 and 13 at Elit building 1 on 8. marta Street, where the local SSP (Freedom and Justice Party) invited citizens to sign for European Serbia, and who requested and approved that engagement.

The DS also asked for documentation on city certifying officials engaged for other electoral lists in the same period. According to the statement, the aim is to establish whether certifying officials were available to everyone on equal terms.

What does Kostadinovic say?

DS General Secretary Dusan Kostadinovic said the case goes beyond a single electoral list and raises a far more serious question: who is claiming the European idea in Serbia today, and what for. In the DS statement he says:

“It is not European to lie, it is not European to break the law, and it is not European to take part in Vucic’s election engineering. Those who named themselves European Serbia and are trying to present themselves as exclusive representatives of the European idea must be the first to explain how they collected signatures and what help from institutions controlled by the authorities they had in that effort.”

Kostadinovic adds what the DS thinks of its own place in the dispute:

“The Democratic Party was founded with the mission of making Serbia a European society, and as an unequivocally pro-European party it has no right to look away when the European name is used as a cover for political operations that have nothing in common with European values.”

In the part of the statement published by the portal Nova.rs, Kostadinovic moves from the certification to the role of formally opposition lists in the campaign, and accuses European Serbia of telling citizens that the regime cannot be beaten:

“The only way for Vucic to prevent his election defeat today is to convince enough people that change is not possible. But not only is it possible, it is within reach. All research, except the regime’s own, shows a clear lead for the Student List and a referendum atmosphere in which the threshold is out of reach for all other formally opposition lists. When it became obvious that European Serbia cannot even approach the threshold, its political function was no longer just to split the Student List’s votes. Its function is to present itself as part of the anti-regime front while telling citizens every day that the regime cannot be defeated. That is a deception. Vucic’s regime is at its very end, and no election engineering, no splitting of votes and no spreading of defeatism will save it.”

Has an answer arrived?

Neither the DS statement nor the outlets that carried it include a response from European Serbia or the Freedom and Justice Party to these claims. We found no reply from them by the time of publication, so it also remains open whether the Novi Pazar City Administration will hand over the requested data.