ISSN: 2560-1601 Vol. 25, No. 1 (RS) Jan 2020 Serbia political briefing: Serbia in 2020 – nothing new on the horizon? IIPE 1052 Budapest Petőfi Sándor utca 11. +36 1 5858 690 Kiadó: Kína-KKE Intézet Nonprofit Kft.
[email protected] Szerkesztésért felelős személy: Chen Xin Kiadásért felelős személy: Huang Ping china-cee.eu 2017/01 Serbia in 2020 – nothing new on the horizon? An estimation of internal political trends The main political event in the Republic of Serbia in 2020 should be regular parliamentary elections. The Republic of Serbia is a single electoral unit and MPs are elected on the basis of the lists of political parties, coalitions of parties, other political organizations and the lists submitted by groups of citizens, and since 1992, the proportional system with the threshold of 5% and D’Hondt formula has been in force. The president of the Republic, Aleksandar Vucic, announced several months ago (at the beginning of November 2019) that the parliamentary elections should be held at the end of March 2020. Furthermore, president Vucic, who is simultaneously the leader of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS – Srpska napredna stranka), disclosed that the aim of SNS is gaining an absolute majority in the parliament, hence 126 deputy seats.1 The seats in question represent minimal majority in the Serbian parliament, which consists of 250 seats in total, which would, however, along with several deputies representing electoral lists of national minorities, enable absolute power at the republic level for Serbian Progressive Party. Another option for SNS is to form a post-electoral coalition with the present partner – the Socialist Party of Serbia – which will almost surely surpass the electoral threshold of 5%, and whose rating goes up to 10% in the last years.