Student list: “You will not manage to stop the diaspora from removing you from power”

The student list “Students Win” addressed Serbia’s authorities today with the message that they will not manage to stop the diaspora from removing them from power, as Danas reports.

The Foreign Ministry’s proposal to the Republic Electoral Commission (RIK) to open polling stations abroad presents a “shameful attempt to sabotage the electoral process, a direct attack on the constitutional order and an open war against our citizens abroad,” the list’s statement says.

“While for years you have publicly praised the diaspora, referred to its patriotism and lived on the money it sends to its families in the homeland, today you spit directly in its face and propose to take away the fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution — the right to vote,” the statement stresses.

The student list recalls that the Foreign Ministry does not set the polling stations — according to the law, only RIK is competent to take the final decision. But, as the list assesses, the very act of sending such a proposal clearly shows the authorities’ intention to, through their ministries, put pressure on RIK and use “the most primitive legal manipulations” so that the polling stations are simply “erased.”

In the end, the list asks the authorities “to stop treating the diaspora as a cash machine, denying it the right to decide the fate of its own country” and concludes: “We will defend the right to vote — because your pressures do not frighten us, they unite us.”

The debate over the diaspora vote has flared up ahead of the early parliamentary elections of October 25, while earlier there were reports of administrative obstacles in registering voters at embassies and consulates.