Roma Party files complaint with RIK against proclaiming the “Rasim Ljajić – Ljudski” list as a minority list

Members of the Roma Party, acting as citizens, submitted last night to the Republic Electoral Commission (RIK) a complaint against this commission’s decision to proclaim the electoral list “Rasim Ljajić – Ljudski (SDP – CDP)” for the October 25 snap parliamentary elections.

The essence of the complaint, according to Roma Party leader Srdjan Shajn, is the demand to annul the decision to proclaim Ljajić’s list as a national minority list. Shajn claims that the holder of the list and a number of candidates on it are publicly known as active members of a majority political party. According to him, the law clearly provides that the RIK rejects by decision the proposal to determine the national minority list status when the legal conditions are not met — for example, when the holder of the list is publicly known as an active member of a political party that is not a national minority party.

The complaint states that Ljajić is not an anonymous political figure, but a politician with long experience and former leader of the Social Democratic Party of Serbia (SDPS), which is not registered as a national minority political party. The complaint also mentions several other candidates on the list — Muamer Baćevac, Edis Durgutović and Ratko Minić — who, it is claimed, have never publicly communicated their departure from party membership or party functions. “After a careful review of public communications, we found that Rasim Ljajić has never, at any moment, sent the message to the public that he is no longer an active member of the majority party. On the contrary, after his resignation, Ljajić has made public statements that he is active and important for the SDPS,” says the Roma Party’s complaint.

On Tuesday, September 15, the RIK proclaimed the list “Rasim Ljajić – Ljudski (SDP – CDP)” for the October 25 elections, granting it also the status of a national minority list. The coalition consists of the Sandžak Democratic Party (SDP) and the Montenegrin Democratic Party (CDP), with 250 candidates, while 7,675 valid voter support statements were certified for the proclamation.

Ljajić dismissed the complaint, calling it Shajn’s “personal animosity.” “I resigned, everything is clean, all RIK members voted. There are members both of the government and of the opposition — do you think anyone would miss the chance to complain if something wasn’t right? Srdjan Shajn does all this out of personal animosity toward me, while he is completely unimportant to me, so I won’t deal with this any further,” Ljajić declared.

Source: Serbian News Media (Beta) — https://snm.rs/romska-partija-podnela-prigovor-rik-u-na-proglasenje-izborne-liste-rasim-ljajic-ljudski/