Focus
HOW THE UKRAINE CONFLICT WILL SHAPE THE SERBIAN POLITICAL SCENE
Fruitless Elections The insistence of the international community that Serbia take a clear stance on the conflict in Ukraine could have far-reaching ramifications for the mapping of the domestic political scene, though it remains unclear what could result from the government’s discomfort and the opposition’s impotence when it comes to finding an answer to a question that’s crucial to the future of the country
T
he Serbian answer to the question of how it will determine its position on the war in Ukraine has seemingly halted and cast into shadow all processes on the country’s internal political scene. The results of the very recent presidential, parliamentary and local elections sound like “old news” under these new circumstances in which foreign policy responses dictate the composition of the future Serbian government and the conditions of cooperation between the government and opposition. The price of the ruling party’s continuous satanizing of the opposi-
18
June
tion is more striking than ever. It has ensured that the party is today tormented in its struggle to find provisional support for the operation of transferring responsibility in making far-reaching decisions and is being forced to rely more on the opposition’s thirst for power than on high-quality interlocutors of European origin who could point the way to a sustainable solution that’s “of critical importance to the future of the country”, as one Focus interlocutor defined it. Here CorD’s four Focus interlocutors deal, in different ways, with unpacking and resolving this puzzle.
