Will there be more of that hot political autumn?

The opposition unitedly and steadfastly demanded extraordinary parliamentary and Belgrade elections, blocked the work of the assembly, which soon stopped working due to general chaos, the progressive majority is nervous, violates procedures more than ever, Ana Brnabić is in a pre-infarction state, Orlić stutters, Dejan Bulatović is hysterical... All this looks like the beginning of the famous hot political autumn, which has been announced for years, and which may happen one day.

The question is, of course, whether the coming months will really be very hot and entail what both the opposition and the critical public would like - the return of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to the streets of Serbian cities, or whether the political struggle will primarily be fought in the Parliament and on other, few platforms available Vučić's opponents, including neighborhood performances. Some wish for a hot political autumn in the form of a non-institutional change of government, but - that will be difficult to achieve.

What seems most certain at the moment - we have another progressive pre-election game ahead of us, although no one yet knows when, how connected or separate, the elections will be held. It is possible that neither Aleksandar Vučić has an answer to that question - at least not at this moment. The only thing there is no doubt about is that they will be irregular even before they are announced. There is a greater chance that a comet will fall on one of Rosandić's crows in front of the parliament than that even fair and free elections will be held under the SNS, at least for the local community council.

photo: sava radovanović / tanjug

Well, on Tuesday morning, the opposition did what had been announced for some time in "well-informed circles" - it demanded from Aleksandar Vučić that special republican and Belgrade elections be called by the end of the year. The opposition leaders announced that, until they receive an acceptable answer to this "submission", they will embark on a new form of political struggle: the blockade of the republican parliament. Given that the progressive majority did not react well to the opposition's noise and whistling during the session on the first day, and showed signs of nervousness, perhaps it can be said that in the first round of the "new assembly" the non-regime MPs won - the session was adjourned, although the hearing on amendments on budget rebalancing, which the government declares a success!

We will see how the matter will go on and what effect the blockade of the parliament will have, whether it will continue and in what form. The opposition, according to some claims, managed to shake the political and social scene numbed by vacation with its premiere performance. Some others, again, say that all this looks like her desperate act.

photo: a. barda / fonet

It is possible that, if it continues, the blockade of the parliament will turn into a multi-day circus that will eventually cease to be interesting even to the opposition public. Zavrzlam will be followed by a campaign by the regime media, which has already begun, saying that non-regime MPs are "scumbags" and "criminals" who are "devastating the work of the parliament" and prevent the adoption of acts that should "significantly improve the lives of citizens", bring about, so to speak, "general improvement". The fact that the progressives and their close ancestors, the radicals, have long ago turned the republican assembly into a pigsty and that the laws that should be passed work to the detriment of the citizens and make the most expensive country in the region even more expensive - these are things that will simply be ignored.

I guess at least someone from the opposition and independent media will remember to speak out about it. All the more so because the progressives will certainly use all the means to vote everything that is planned for the current session, because those legal solutions bring new, big fortunes to them and their clients.

WHEN WILL THE ELECTIONS BE CALLED?

photo: Instagram of the President of Serbia

It is somehow difficult to imagine that the supreme ruler will react to the new opposition action by quickly calling elections, of course not because of the procedures, as some progressives claim. I don't understand. - Vučić, progressives and respect for procedures! It will drag on because calling elections in the short term could be seen as the president's political defeat. And he doesn't like to lose symbolic battles either. When you lose, kill - as one social network user wrote.

Maybe the events deny us, but it is more realistic to expect that the progressives will call the elections when the political storm in the assembly calms down. Only if there are no background agreements, but that is hard to imagine. However, there is no doubt that there will be elections, especially extraordinary parliamentary ones. Not only did Vučić set the deadline for this government of Ana Brnabić, who will appear on the bench to drink water and be examined by a physiatrist, not only did Vučić (and not only he) announce republican elections several times in a short period of time , but also because in recent months, quite obviously, he embarked on an election campaign, trying to rapidly remove the stains previously produced by his comrades. Some will say, he is in a constant campaign. That's true, but recent campaign folklore is visibly pre-election.

In short, as far as the parliamentary elections are concerned, the opposition is knocking on the open door. But when it comes to the Belgrade elections, it remains to be seen how things stand, although Aleksandar Vučić was clear – you want Belgrade elections, you will get them! But there is a slightly more complicated situation that will possibly require additional observation by the President's Special Team on Elections, Assessments, Research, Fraud and Fraud.

As a reminder, regular provincial and local elections will certainly be held in the spring of next year. It is claimed that it would be very procedurally complicated to speed them up, but does anyone doubt that all local authorities would resign, competing to see who would do it faster, if the president asked them politely?

IT WILL BE HOW VUCIĆ DECIDES

photo: a. barda / fonet

Of course, in the end it will be as Vučić decides. And he will be guided by the ratings and advice of the aforementioned special team. It has already been decided, as we said, that the elections will be irregular, and there is not even a millimeter of room for doubt that the well-known electoral machinery will be engaged again in full capacity: vote buying, blackmail, Bulgarian and all other trains, bribing members election commissions... The progressives otherwise use all fraudulent actions that have been recorded since the elections held in the area of ​​present-day India, in 920 BC, when voters used palm leaves to select members of the village board - until today. When it comes to elections, they feel right at home. They don't know how to lead the country, but they know how to gossip, everywhere and certainly, even in elections. If we don't know how to work, we know how to win elections!

It has already been said several times that Vučić often practices elections not only because he feels superior in them with the accompanying state, party and criminal infrastructure, but especially because he has an opponent against him who is tied hand and foot, eyes and ears, of course mouth. It's like when you put a banana on a basket for a seven-year-old child, and you're two meters tall! Some would call it a kind of sadism.

In addition, he needs elections in order to draw legitimacy from them and to better position his party during the distribution of the post-election cake with partners. Many party employees are activated, and there is additional budget money to pay their loyalty. He extracts more money from the budget for the top of the party, diverts the public's attention from countless problems, promotes "great economic successes", "towers and cities" that sprout up to overshadow simplicity thanks to enormous foreign debt, and for which the question is whether they will withstand the first strong earthquake …

PARADISE FOR SATIRISTS AND CARICATURISTS

photo: a. barda / fonet

With spotlights, cameras, and a bunch of verified journalists-propagandists, Vučić has been sparring Serbia for days. This latest campaign seems to some of the citizens as before - tragicomic, this whole bleak, boring media "spectacle", an inexhaustible source of inspiration for satirists and cartoonists. But, no matter how hopeless it looks, the kanda "spectacle" still works. The corrupt tragicomedy does not touch them as long as they can feel the waiter's tip full of money in their pockets, and those whose brains have been systematically destroyed, who do not know whether they have gone or come and whose consciousness has been mixed with reality, reality shows, endless TV novelas and the continuous public appearances of the ruler - the Vučić phenomenon seems like something completely normal. They are looking for more, new seasons. There are also others, who live in their asylums, and who look at all this as if it were happening in some distant Azerbaijan.

The president recently became an honorary citizen of Subotica, thanks to the votes of the Union of Vojvodina Hungarians and a brotherly hug with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The coalition of the largest Hungarian party in Vojvodina with the team that once tried to expel them across the border brings a lot of good to the ruling minority elite, and how ordinary citizens of Hungarian nationality view it - the population census shows best. After that, the Subotica inscription in Hungarian at the entrance to the city was torn down, which is another contribution to good-neighborly relations, i.e. the cooperation of nationalists. We know how pacts between nationalists have been concluded in the distant and recent past, but they work well in the campaign.

Vučić goes around and brags about his unprecedented successes, people play stakes, accordions are heard, the roads are like an "asphalt runway", they are finished long before the deadline, he promises big money, renovates schools, opens factories, unbuilt bridges, increases pensions and salaries, calls on citizens to help progress continue, and that "children do not go to war".

In Veliki Radinci, at the foot of Fruška Gora, everyone was excited and cheering. The former minister Nedimović made an effort to make the ceremony to welcome the president up to par, to please the president again, with whom he allegedly had a crush. A well-thought-out song that looks as if it was designed by Žika Obretković: "You built roads and railways, stadiums, the necessities of others." In Novi Pazar, everyone laughed at the president's "cute" outburst when he mixed up "mufties" and "mantles"... Well, not only does everything smell like elections, but it seems like it smells like his favorite elections - all at once, idiots. Maybe he would add the presidential ones, but that would mean that he would have to resign. It won't go that far though.

By the way, if that's the idea, then the demands of the opposition, the right wing, which believes that the only way out of the political crisis - extraordinary elections at all levels - are in favor of the progressives. They do not mention the presidential ones.

OPPOSITION AND CONFUSION

Because of all this, the opposition's request to hold extraordinary parliamentary and Belgrade elections by the end of the year seems confusing. Namely, it remains unclear whether the request implies their simultaneity or separation. The information we get is contradictory, so it is questionable whether there is any agreement on this within the anti-Vučić bloc. If you insist on simultaneous voting, it will definitely confuse the citizens, given the fact that for years - quite logically - both the opposition and the critical public have been advocating that elections at the republican and local levels be separated. If simultaneous elections for the republican and city parliaments are already being sought, then why couldn't the others be added to them? Progressives will say, it's cheaper that way. And we have already spoken about the procedures.

It is commonplace that a parallel campaign at the state and lower levels of government is in favor of the SNS: an atmosphere is being created, and very consciously, that even in "some Šišinci" people vote for or against Vučić, who is still the most popular politician, and also are blurred by the so-called local specificities. He thus covers with his "Ibermensch shadow" the innumerable inactions of institutional and non-institutional progressive ags and beys, who have been hidden for years in undisguised, arrogant thievery which unmistakably leads Serbia into a kind of postmodern feudalism. Citizens often vote in a unified way in simultaneous elections, thus the activities and inactivity, personnel potential of certain opposition groups or groups of citizens at the local level are thrown into the background. In fact, we are discovering a "hole in the pot", because one of the democratic achievements of developed countries is precisely the separation of state and local politics. And that also applies to Belgrade, no matter how much it seems like a separate planet to some.

If we are talking about the request for simultaneous parliamentary and Belgrade elections, it is doubtful what the opposition's or individual parts of the opposition's calculations are. Perhaps one believes in the opposite effect - one may think that a huge turnout of anti-regime voters could be gathered in greater Belgrade, in the context of a huge rebellion after the May tragedies, and this may also be reflected in the results at the state level. Perhaps it is also believed that the possible good results of the opposition in Belgrade could be a flywheel for the opposition in the local and provincial elections, which - as we said, unless otherwise decided - will be held in the spring of next year. Perhaps he is playing the card that only thematizing the possible close Belgrade elections would deepen the divisions within the SNS, especially between Šapić's clientele and the progressive "natives". Be that as it may, one should certainly keep in mind that opposition-minded or dissatisfied citizens from the "inside" are not impressed by the large concentration of the opposition in the capital, however much its eventual victory in Belgrade would represent a strong blow to the regime.

However, even if it is a request that implies that the republican and Belgrade elections be held separately, but still in a short period of time, they will still have an influence on each other. God forbid, the request may even be a kind of volley to the progressives. Let's say, if the parliamentary elections are held a week or two before the Belgrade ones and if the progressives again - of course, in completely irregular conditions - achieve a significant victory, this could affect demobilization, i.e. a reduced turnout of opposition Belgraders in local elections. A similar thing can happen if the parliamentary elections are held immediately before the provincial and local elections, including those in Belgrade.

THINGS FROM A DIFFERENT ANGLE

But let's lower the tone of criticism and look at things from another angle. In abnormal political conditions, it is really difficult to be the opposition, and certain mistakes and confusions are understandable.

How to act as an opposition in a disintegrating, autocratic state-dystopia is an equation with a hundred unknowns, which changes daily. Even if a council of sages were to be formed, with all their experiences, including Lenin, Gandhi, Churchill and Patrice Lumumba - it is certain that even he would not have an effective and simple recipe for overthrowing Vučić, and it is also certain that after dissolved two or three meetings due to internal disagreements.

Despite the often justified dissatisfaction with the opposition, it should be borne in mind that the opposition grew on scorched earth, that the government, with the tacit consent or cooperation of a good part of Serbia, including the legendary "white lists", has been throwing napalm bombs at it since 2012. . Opposite them is a joint venture that has privatized everything, sold the entire country and has the money to provide the education of the neighbor's great-grandchildren at the most expensive universities in America or England. We don't even need to mention the media, institutions harnessed with halters and bridles... And then social problems: twisted value system, dramatically low level of political literacy, lack of solidarity, complete preoccupation with one's own and neglecting common interests, tendency to corruption ("resourcefulness"), "disgust ” politics. There are, of course, also parts of the non-regime political and social public who consciously or unconsciously work for the government in various ways. Not to mention the fact that the regime still has international support from various parts of the world, which was achieved in different ways.

Therefore, the former Prime Minister of Vojvodina, Bojan Pajtić, will say in an interview for "Vreme" that it is important that the opposition, in such difficult conditions, regardless of everything, shows initiative and courage, is active and persistent, and does not give up its struggle, institutional and extra-institutional. .

"The government is not only not legitimate, it is only apparently legal. When someone is elected in violation of the Constitution and the law, and the heritage 'wins' by blocking the media, buying votes and threats, it is logical that they will ignore civil protests whenever and as much as they can. Politicians who establish unchangeable power by force and at any cost do not care about political responsibility. Therefore, non-classical pressure methods are necessary. It is good that the opposition shows initiative and courage, it is important that they remain persistent", concludes Pajtić.