The issue of the electoral threshold is marginal, but it has been placed high on the agenda by daily political calculations
Text by Dejan Bursać, a researcher at the Institute for Political Studies in Belgrade
On January 21st, the Serbian Progressive Party’s (SNS) parliamentary caucus submitted an official proposal to reduce the electoral threshold from 5 to 3 per cent, just ten days after the idea was publicly presented. To remind, last year, several opposition parties participated in a dialogue about changing electoral conditions in order to satisfy the minimum of democratic standards, particularly in areas such as equal media representation, exerting pressure on voters and the conducting elections at polling stations. It seems that despite some positive signals, the dialogue did not produce results and the majority of the opposition decided to boycott the election. The proposal to reduce the electoral threshold should be seen as a response from the SNS. In the case of the boycott, there was a serious risk that only the current ruling parties (SNS and SPS) and national minority parties would enter the parliament (they are subject to different rules: the so-called natural electoral threshold which roughly stands at 0.4% of votes) which would put President Vučić in a rather uncomfortable situation in front of the domestic and international public. Having a single-party parliament, is bad news for a country with fragile democracy. With the 3% threshold, which in practice could amount to about 90,000 votes, a few more parties, that are nominally considered opposition but will not boycott the elections, could enter the parliament and thus provide the required legitimacy to both the elections and the next SNS formed government.
The move is not illegal, but a change in election rules a few months before the elections take place does not represent the best democratic practice. It takes some time for the stakeholders (political parties and citizens) to accept the changes and make rational decisions based on them. Moreover, almost no stakeholder has publicly demanded a lower electoral threshold, especially not during the dialogue about electoral conditions. The 5% threshold is not perceived as an election problem in Serbia. On the other hand, the academia and the non-governmental sector have for years indicated the need to change the entire electoral system. Serbia is a rare example of a country with a proportional system with one constituency and completely closed electoral lists. In the EU, only the Netherlands and Slovakia have similar systems, with one important exception and that is that, in these countries, there is a preferential vote, whereby voters can choose individual MPs from the electoral lists. In Serbia, such civic influence does not exist. The moment a person votes for an entire political party list, the connection between citizens and parliamentarians is lost. Such a system is great for political parties, but bad for voters, the parliament and democracy in general. There is also a complete lack of accountability of MPs towards citizens. An MP is only responsible to the party, namely, the more loyal they are, the greater the chance of being high on the electoral list in the next election. He is not interested in citizens, and in the event of a conflict between the interests of the political party and the interests of the citizens, the party always wins. In addition, no Serbian citizen can really say who is representing them in the parliament today, i.e. who is their MP. Other shortcomings of the current system are: extreme fragmentation, with a number of small political parties “pushing” into parliament via large coalitions; as well as metropolisation, meaning that an above-average number of MPs comes from the capital, while almost half of the local governments are not represented in the parliament. One possible solution to these problems is to reform the electoral system towards a kind of majority vote, in which citizens would elect individual MPs in small, single-member constituencies. Voting in single-member units primarily addresses the problem of the relationship between voters and their representatives, which becomes more immediate. Disciplining in such a system is primarily in the hands of the citizen, and the MP must represent the interests of their constituency. Also, because citizens would be voting for individual people, parties would tend to single out quality candidates, which increases the quality of parliament as a whole. There are different variations of majority and mixed electoral systems that may be relevant to current problems of democracy in Serbia, but unfortunately, these issues are not on the agenda of the decision-makers. The issue of electoral threshold, on the other hand, is marginal, but it has been placed high on the agenda by daily political calculations.