Four minority lists have so far been proclaimed for the snap parliamentary elections. They are Ljajić’s SDP-CDP, the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians, Usame Zukorlić’s Party of Justice and Reconciliation, and the Russian Party. A fifth minority list, Sulejman Ugljanin’s SDA Sandžak, has also announced that it will contest the elections.
It would not be unusual if most of them had not previously contested elections on the list of the Serbian Progressive Party, raising the question of whether the regime led by Aleksandar Vučić is planning to use this approach to secure a majority in the event of a close result. Political scientist Dejan Bursać told Nova that minority parties traditionally want to be the “kingmaker” and align themselves with the strongest party because they gain both political and material benefits from doing so.
The first minority list submitted was “Rasim Ljajić – Ljudski (SDP – CDP)”. The Republic Election Commission (RIK) verified 8,053 legally valid signatures of support for the list, more than the 5,000 required for national minority lists. It will appear as number four on the ballot. Although he is the list bearer, Ljajić will not be a parliamentary candidate; instead, the first candidate on the list is Dženan Palamar, director of the Novi Pazar Cultural Center.
That same evening, September 15, under number five, RIK also proclaimed the minority list “Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians – Dr. Balint Pastor,” whose bearer is the party president, who is also the first candidate on the list. The SVM collected 9,531 certified signatures.
Both lists have 250 candidates for members of parliament.
Two days later, the list “Usame Zukorlić (SPP) Movement for Unification” was proclaimed and will appear as number six on the ballot. Its bearer is Usame Zukorlić, president of the Party of Justice and Reconciliation. The list submitted 6,182 legally valid signatures and consists of 181 candidates, with Zukorlić also being the first candidate on the list.
That evening, the list “Russian Party – Serbia in BRICS – Slobodan Nikolić” was also proclaimed, with 5,101 valid signatures and 25 candidates for parliament. List bearer Nikolić is also the first candidate.
SDA Sandžak President Sulejman Ugljanin has also announced an independent run, with the list to be called “SDA Sandžak – Guardians of Sandžak.”
“If they run on two or three lists, tens of thousands of votes are lost. If they ran on a single list, not a single vote would be lost and everyone would get at least three MPs,” Ugljanin said, adding that his party had invited other Bosniak parliamentary parties to run together, but that the proposal was not accepted.
At first glance, this is a legitimate right of minority communities to have their own representatives. However, there are suspicions that this is actually a struggle to cross the electoral threshold and a dispersal of votes, with these parties ultimately aligning themselves with the SNS if it wins.
Minority parties are the “kingmakers”
Dejan Bursać, senior research associate at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, told Nova that minority parties generally count on such a scenario.
“It is no secret that minorities always seek to be some kind of ‘kingmaker,’ meaning that they will side with whoever is more likely to form a majority in parliament, that is, form the government. Our system is unfortunately set up in such a way that minorities exercise their rights, and partly gain certain kinds of material benefits, from going with the strongest party in the country. Who that will be, of course, is another question,” Bursać said.
Nova’s interlocutor also explained what chances minority parties have of entering parliament.
“In the case of Hungarians, it is mostly the SVM, although I expect that some of the votes from that community will flow toward the students in this election cycle. The same can be said for the Bosniak community, although we know that there is no unified offer there, but rather that they are running in three columns. The Albanian community usually gets a few hundred or a thousand votes above the minority threshold, that is, the natural threshold for minorities that we have, with the high turnout we expect. They could perhaps have a problem crossing that natural electoral threshold in the upcoming elections, because they have more or less a fixed number of votes they expect.
If the performances of the aforementioned minority parties in previous elections are compared, the biggest shift was made by Ljajić. He founded both the Sandžak Democratic Party (SDP) and the Social Democratic Party of Serbia (SDPS), and has since left the SDPS.
Those two parties have always run together until now, and in the 2022 and 2023 elections, both were on the SNS list. From 2014 to 2023, the SDPS ran in every parliamentary election on lists led by the SNS. Now things have changed, with the SDP running together with the Montenegrin Democratic Party. The SDPS is running on a list with the Socialist Party of Serbia.
Speaking about his role on the SDP-CDP list, Ljajić emphasized that he is not a candidate and will not be on the electoral list, but is only its bearer.
“I founded that party, so of course I want to increase its visibility. People asked me to be the bearer of the list. I said that I could not be on the list, because as soon as I left the SDPS it would be illogical for me to now be on this other list. But I want to be the bearer, in order to increase the visibility of this coalition and give it a chance to achieve the best possible result,” Ljajić explained to FoNet on September 15.
According to him, the SDP-CDP list is not entering the elections with the aim of winning, but of securing enough mandates so that its vote will be decisive in the future composition of parliament.
Usame Zukorlić’s SPP, on the other hand, has never been on the SNS list. However, Zukorlić was Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly from August 2022 to May 2024, and since 2024 has been a minister without portfolio.
The Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians also traditionally runs independently, but for years has entered government with the SNS after elections. In the 2022 elections, the SVM won five mandates, and in 2023, six.
As for the Russian Party, it did not participate in the 2022 elections, while in previous years it had run independently in parliamentary elections and won no mandates.
Despite this, the Russian Party has been significant at the local level when it comes to forming governments, with the 2024 elections in Niš being a prime example. At the time, “Russian Party – Russia and Niš in the Heart” won one seat, and its councilor Tihomir Perić was crucial to forming a majority in the city. Perić supported the Serbian Progressive Party, enabling the SNS-led authorities to secure a majority in the Niš City Assembly. Particular attention was drawn to the fact that Perić had previously said that he was not Russian and did not speak the Russian language.
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