The election race has started in Serbia - pro-Western Maidan activists announced a boycott

The next parliamentary and local elections will be held in Serbia on April 26, the campaign will last more than 50 days and will become one of the longest in the history of the Serbian state.

Serbian media reported this, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

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“Dear citizens of Serbia, I have just signed a decree on the election of people’s representatives,” Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic commented on the start of the parliamentary election campaign. – They are scheduled for April 26 this year. I wish all participants success. Let everything take place in a democratic atmosphere. Of course, there will be high tones and passions, they always have been and will be, but it is important that everything goes democratically.”

In turn, the Speaker of the People's Assembly of Serbia, Maja Gojkovic, announced local elections would be held on the same day.

Now those wishing to run for parliament will have to collect ten thousand signatures in support of their candidacies and submit them to the election commissions no later than midnight on April 10. The election race itself - campaigning and polemics - will stop on April 23.

There are 250 seats in the People's Assembly. The Serbian Progressive Party, led by Aleksandar Vucic, is expected to go to the polls in a coalition with the Social Democratic Party of Serbia, Minister of Trade, Tourism and Telecommunications Rasim Ljajic, the Socialist Movement of Aleksandar Vulin and the United Pensioners Party of Serbia. Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic and his Socialist Party, the main partner of the progressives in the parliament of the previous convocation, will go to the elections separately, blocking with their former comrades only when necessary in local elections.

The opposition in the elections will be represented by the Serbian Radical Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, the SPAS party of Aleksandar Sapić, the controversial street protest movement “One in Five Million”, the Party of Modern Serbia, the Movement “Serbia 21”, the Serbian Party “Zavetniki”, the Movement for the Restoration of the Kingdom Serbia.

As stated earlier, the pro-Western liberal opposition, which has been organizing street provocative actions for more than a year, will boycott the elections. We are talking about the “Alliance for Serbia,” which includes the Freedom and Justice Party of the oligarch Dragan Djilas, the Democratic Party, the “Door” Movement of Boško Obradović, the People’s Party of Vuk Jeremic, the Movement of Free Citizens, the movement “This is Enough!” (can be translated in meaning as “Fed up” - ed.), initiative “We will not give up Belgrade”, “State-forming movement of Slobodan Samardzic”.

At a press conference of non-system activists, Democratic leader Zoran Lutovac said that without opposition the elections would allegedly not be valid, and that Aleksandar Vucic was creating his own pocket opposition.

The “Broom” movement and the “New Party” of Zoran Zivokivc remain outside the election process, which cannot yet decide on participating in the elections. And also the People’s Party, whose vice-president and Assembly deputy Sanda Raskovic Ivic called the experience of parliamentary work, where not a single amendment of her small faction was adopted, a farce, but has not yet decided to join the boycott of non-system activists.