With Serbia now planning to partially re-run the Dec. 17 elections on Dec. 30—and with it drawing sharp criticism from Europe and the US over alleged voting irregularities—one person is taking the commentary head on and also offering up some of her own.
Serbia’s long-serving prime minister, Ana Brnabic.
Brnabic vehemently disagrees with statements from at least two international observers, claiming that both Stefan S. and Andreas S. “lied” and that this is causing “destabilization” within Serbia.
“[Council of Europe] observers went to [United Group owner Dragan] Solak’s channels and lied,” she said in an interview with TV Pink, which is seen as siding with the SNS, which according to Dec. 17 results, won the election.
Brnabic also noted that the observers claimed there were up to 50,000 “phantom voters,” according to the Serbian news site N1.
Interestingly, there have been reports of thousands of voters streaming in from Kosovo and Republika Srpska, which is the Serb-dominated province of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and locally some have wondered whether the observers recognized such voting as legitimate.
Photo by of Prime Minister Ana Brnabic by Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government, Republic of Serbia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
