Yesterday, the President of the People’s Party, Vuk Jeremic, called on the institutions of the European Union to exert their political influence and force the government of Aleksandar Vucic to engage in new negotiations with the Serbian opposition under the supervision of the EU institutions themselves.
Jeremic said that the strategic objective of these negotiations would be the creation of suitable conditions for free and fair elections in the country, which should take place as soon as possible.
“There is no more time to lose if we want to preserve Europe’s credibility,” says Jeremic in his article titled “Dictatorship next door: Why the Serbian regime threatens Europe’s credibility”, published on the Euractive portal in Brussels, arguing that the government led by Vucic cannot and does not want to aspire to regional reconciliation or Serbia’s rapprochement with the EU.
Jeremic writes:
“More than anyone else, Vucic knows his regime is mired in illegitimacy, especially since he held a sham parliamentary election less than a month ago, which was boycotted by all mainstream opposition parties, including my own People’s Party.
The results speak for themselves: with his junior coalition partners, Aleksandar Vucic now controls around 235 of the 250 seats in the National Assembly. In Europe, on this score, Serbia is surpassed in infamy only by Belarus.
With this sham election, Vucic completed the case against himself. Not only did the campaign take place under falsified epidemiological conditions—grounds for a criminal prosecution, in and of itself—but also in flagrantly undemocratic political ones.
Discover the most important foreign investments in Serbia in 2019: click here!
As far as Kosovo goes, Jeremic says:
“With regards to the negotiations about Kosovo’s future status, Vučić has managed to successfully string along the international community for eight years in clandestine coordination with his counterpart in Priština, Hashim Thaci, who has recently been indicted for war crimes.”
Jeremic concludes; “By now it should be painfully obvious that Vučić’s galloping despotism and ignominious record of violence, subterfuge, duplicity, and perjury is anathema to the democratic values that stand at the foundation of the European Union. His regime cannot and will not either achieve regional reconciliation or bring Serbia closer to the EU.
A strong, practical, and public response by the leaders of Europe—building upon the foundation laid by the sincere efforts of individual MEPs earlier this year—might yet contribute to Serbia’s reversal of fortune.”
(Blic, 16.07.2020)
This post is also available in: Italiano