In exactly a month and a half, the citizens of Serbia will go to the polls, as parliamentary and Belgrade elections have been scheduled.
Coincidentally or not, right before the elections, pensioners and welfare recipients will receive money from the state, but that is only one part of the election campaign.
An indispensable part of Aleksandar Vučić’s machinery for winning as many votes as possible is his usual practice of praising the current government and criticizing the former governments, particularly when it comes to the government’s results related to infrastructure (construction of roads, motorways, railroads, bridges, tunnels, etc.)
Every time Vučić has a TV appearance he never fails to brag about how many kilometres of roads and motorways this government has built in relation to previous governments. However, statistics and official data don’t support his claims that the SNS-led government has built more roads than their earlier counterparts.
The official data collated by the State Statistics Office (RZS) paints a different picture.
“We did 108 kilometres of high-speed rail, they (the previous government) did 0 km. We reconstructed 807 kilometres of railway, they reconstructed 31.5 km. Just look at those numbers. We have 445 kilometres of completed motorways, they built 36.5 km plus 6.1 km, which is 42.6 kilometres in total,” said Vučić.
However, nobody knows where he got these numbers.
As for motorways, from 2001 to 2012 (pre-SNS), the Serbian government built a total of 435 kilometres and 41 kilometres of motorway extensions. So, that’s 476 kilometres in total.
Regarding the current government, it built 514 kilometres of motorways and 9 km of extensions which is 523 kilometres in total.
So, this information is correct and the SNS-led government “wins” by 47km.
The government before the SNS-led one built 1,435 kilometres of new roads (other than motorways and expressways), plus 459 kilometres of extensions, which is about 1,894 kilometres in total.
From 2013 to 2022, the current government built 513 km of new roads and about 37 kilometres of extensions, a total of 550 kilometres.
The last category we compared based on the official RZS data are roads that belong to other categories and streets. The previous government built 5,756 kilometres, and 813 km of extensions, which is 6,569 kilometres in total, while the current government built 2,685 km and added 213 kilometres of extensions, which in total amounts to 2,898 kilometres.
In summary, the former governments built and extended about 8,939 kilometres of roads while the SNS-led government built and extended about 3,971 kilometres – more than twice as much.
(Nova, 03.11.2023)
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