Za "Time" from Bonn
If he really wanted to vote, a citizen of Serbia from Vancouver on the west coast can buy a plane ticket to Toronto - that's three or four hundred euros. After a flight of four and a half hours, in Toronto, he will go to Eglinton Avenue, where there is a glass office building at number 40, and the consulate of the Republic of Serbia is in the building. There he can vote in the wee hours and then back to Vancouver.
"Those who want, find a way. Those who don't, look for excuses," said some deputies of the government in the Republican Election Commission (RIC), defending the decision to cut off thirty thousand people from the diaspora from voting.
Just before the deadline (October 5, twenty days before the elections), the REC made two controversial decisions. First, to vote according to Serbian time, which for people in New York, Ottawa or Beijing means that they should also vote at night, as if they were going to a strip bar. Second, to open only 93 polling stations in the diaspora, and to increase the number of polling stations only in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It was supposed to match the unprecedented interest of the citizens in the dispersion for the elections in the registry office on October 25. About 106.000 people registered to vote, far more than the previous record of 40.000.
It is still a part of the diaspora (see box), but it finally becomes a factor in the elections. Turnout in the diaspora is usually high, around 80 percent, because those who don't want to vote don't register. If that were the case this time, the diaspora would have almost as many voters as there are in Kragujevac, the fourth largest city in Serbia. Or how many Hungarians and Albanians who won a total of seven mandates in 2023 according to the minority key will go to the elections.
IT'S KNOWN WHO IT IS FOR
You don't need polls to know in whose favor the growth of interest is going. Social networks are full of informal groups from all over the world, most of them have the number "3" on their profile pictures.
"Students, these young people who are fighting to change the system, gave us a wind behind us and showed us that our voice is also important", say Silvija Mijajlović Ružić and Miloš Lukić from the informal group Protest Support Stuttgart.
They started out waiting for student cyclists and marathoners, but they stayed together. "For decades, the institutions of our country of birth have discriminated against us and treated us as if we didn't exist. It was precisely because of this corruption, distrust in the system and the inability to work in the profession that many of us left."
The majority in the Republican Electoral Commission, under the control of the authorities, left numerous cities without polling stations without solid explanations. Apart from Vancouver, there will be no voting in Dubai or Herceg Novi, where Vučić previously lost elections. There will be no vote at the embassy in Bratislava because construction work is reportedly underway there.
As the sources of "Vremen" from the Republic of Croatia said, they have been warning the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Marko Đurić for weeks to ask each country for approval to open polling stations, and the Ministry is making it difficult. When it comes to Germany, they received an explanation that the "Germans" did not approve additional polling stations, so voting must be done only at the embassy in Berlin, and the consulates in Munich, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Frankfurt.
And that even though the diaspora collected more than a hundred applications, as defined by law for Cologne, Hanover, Nuremberg and Karlsruhe. It turned out that Đurić's ministry is lying.
"Until now, no request has been made to open additional polling stations outside the diplomatic missions of the Republic of Serbia in Germany," the German Embassy in Serbia replied. For "Vreme", they add that the Government in Berlin usually processes requests quickly and routinely.
photo: phonetSupport for the student movement from the diaspora
MANY ARE COMING TO SERBIA
Although requests to vote abroad were regularly approved in Belgrade, people from the diaspora often did not receive confirmations. One can call some consulates and send them emails, but they do not send letters or postcards, so the citizen is left to check his name in the official online voter list when it is closed and see where he was "ranked" for voting.
"Many of our people live far from diplomatic and consular missions, which makes voting physically and financially demanding," said Mijajlović Ružić and Lukić from Stuttgart.
Psina was also applied to the numerous diaspora in Switzerland. It will be possible to vote there only in Bern and Zurich. Lugano and Geneva, where last time the vote was held outside diplomatic facilities, have been crossed off the list. And that even though the diaspora has stepped up to open a polling station in Basel as well, Anamarija Nikoletić from the group Basel with students tells us.
She also felt the wind of change at the gatherings. "It happened that passers-by, mostly our compatriots, would throw not-so-nice things at us when we gathered in Basel, but there were many more who supported us, and we also touched a lot of tourists from Serbia who happened to be there," he told "Vreme".
There is one unknown at stake - how many people from the dispersion will come to Serbia on election day? There are a lot of anecdotes about this, because people are afraid that they won't get high abroad, but also because they expect that the elections could have "extensions" on the street.
"I am not so shocked by the absence of a polling station in Herceg Novi that I bought a ticket to Belgrade three weeks ago," wrote X theater director Staša Koprivica online.
THEIR EARS REALLY HURRY
Yesterday's President Aleksandar Vučić tried to laconically defend the insane decisions of the Rik: "If the difference is two or three thousand votes, let them win immediately. I'm counting on a difference of 400.000 to 500.000, not two thousand votes. Since they know and see how things are unfolding, they know that they lose, so they have to show nervousness in every place."
He added that the law does not say that a polling station in the diaspora "must" be opened if a certain number of people register, "but everything is good will if they are able". And he also boasted that the most polling stations will be opened so far.
But the entire increase falls on Bosnia and Herzegovina, where there will be as many as 28 election stations. There is no voting in San Diego and Cologne, but there will be voting in the M:tel office in Banja Luka, in schools in Vlasenica, Sokolac and Foča.
Sofija Mandić, a lawyer and member of the Republican Election Commission, sees the decisions on polling stations and voting times as pure interference.
"Neither were the majority in the RIK happy to defend the decisions, they came quite sour. But then they still defended them sourly", she says for "Vreme". "You see exactly, as if they tell you - over a hundred thousand people signed up? Our ears hurt.. "
The law otherwise threatens up to one year in prison for obstructing citizens from exercising their right to vote. But, apparently, these are stories for better times, if they come.
While this issue of "Vremen" goes to press, the decisions are in force, but there are still a few days to change them - if there is "good will". The reaction of the commissioner for the protection of equality, Milan Antonijević, also shows how obvious the matter is. About fifteen days ago, Antonijević jokingly told the Serbian diaspora in the Netherlands that people from Maastricht can use "comfortable Dutch trains" to reach the embassy in The Hague in "just over two and a half hours".
Only when the RIK made its decision, Antonijevic sent them a letter stating: "When the polling place is far from the place of residence, and getting there involves high costs, a long journey or complex logistics, it can become an obstacle due to which part of the voters are left without the opportunity to vote."
MORE THAN MONEY REMITTANCE
Thus, for the second time in the Vučić era, guest workers became a foreign body that should be cut off. The first time was during the pandemic, when they could not enter their country of birth.
Admittedly, the government was careful where it opened polling stations. Let's say, in the last elections, Vučić's list did better in Vienna than in the register. The results show where the old bastions of guest workers, less educated and more open to beating patriotic chests, are, and where there are more highly educated and more urban pečalbars.
That's how people who constantly listen to them live there somewhere i why are they even interested in Serbia? decided to finally become an electoral factor in Serbia, which for decades they have been saving from poverty with remittances estimated at four to eight billion euros per year. Hundreds of thousands of families in Serbia live on it.
Anamarija Nikoletić from Basel has simple expectations: "For the students to win, so that we can all slowly return to our lives, work, family, friends, what our involvement in the previous two years was and how it had an impact. I hope that this interest of the diaspora will continue in all future votes."
How many are "our people"?
Despite record interest, perhaps only every tenth citizen of Serbia who lives between Alaska and Australia registered to vote abroad.
But, exactly how many people are "outside"? There is no precise information anywhere, nor is it determined by the census in Serbia. Most estimates say that there are slightly more than a million of them, out of about 6,7 million people on the voter list, which both the opposition and international observers say is disordered.
More meticulous Western countries, such as Germany, know how many Serbian citizens they have with residence. At the end of 2024, 273.000 Serbian citizens were counted in Germany. To that should be added those with dual citizenship, which has been enabled since June of that year. Then the number of requests did increase, so in the whole of 2024, 4.675 Serbian citizens received (i) German citizenship.
But, as elsewhere, no one knows how many of these people live permanently in Germany. Or how many there are who come to work and live illegally.
The megalomaniacal estimates shared by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of 800.000 people of "Serbian roots" in Germany are not important here, because only citizens can vote, not people who feel like Serbs, go to church and cultural and artistic evenings.
