The outcome of Serbia’s snap parliamentary election in four weeks looks more uncertain the closer one looks at current polls. What few there are, they each come with huge issues.

If the marketing research agency Faktor Plus from Beograd is to be believed, Aleksandar Vučić will not be without office for long.

On Sunday, he resigned as President of Serbia, in order to run for his party SNS in the upcoming snap elections for Serbia’s parliament in four weeks. He wants to become Prime Minister.

His resignation is one of few public announcements he has made good on as of late.

According to Faktor Plus‘ latest poll from a week ago, SNS can expect to gather 48.6 per cent of the popular vote. This would a notch above SNS‘ result from four years ago, and would certainly guarantee them an absolute majority in Serbia’s National Assembly.

Faktor Plus‘ poll suggests shifts in Serbia’s party system that benefit Aleksandar Vučić and his clericonationalist SNS.

For one, just before the poll, Serbia’s Radical Party (SRS) announced it would slip under SNS‘ wide election umbrella. Rather than run on its own, SRS will be part of SNS‘ election list, like many other minor parties. SRS just got two per cent of the vote three years ago. Those votes will now go to SNS, stabilizing its results.

SRS is one of the vilest nationalist parties in Serbia. In a sense, its quasi unification with its former splinter party SNS will let the history of Serbia’s far right go full circe. Vučić started his career as one of SRS‘ firebrands in the 1990’s. SRS‘ founder and war criminal Vojislav Šešelj was his mentor.

In part, SNS’s seeming stability in the polls could also be explained by cannibalizing its coalition partner in Serbia’s current government, the Socialist Party SPS. SPS just hovers above four per cent in the polls. Given the margin of error, it is not guaranteed it will even meet the threshold of three per cent of the vote necessary to gain seats in parliament.

SPS, the successor party to the Communist Party of Serbia, founded by Slobodan Milošević, has been part of each Serbian government since 1990, except the period between 2000 and 2007.

The Student’s List, backed by Serbia’s students in protest, is predicted to gain around 37 per cent of the popular vote in Faktor Plus‘ poll. It is backed by virtually all opposition parties in Serbia’s government. Most of them have chosen not to run this time in favor of the students.

Whatever small parties on the ballot there will be on the 25th of October will likely not make it into parliament, with the exception of those representing the country’s ethnic minorities, which are excempt from the three per cent threshold.

One is right to be skeptical about this poll.

There Are More Credible Stories

For one there is the general political crisis Serbia has been in for a year and a half.

When the freshly renovated canopy of Novi Sad’s freshly renovated train station collapsed and killed 16 people on November 1st 2024, this sparked student led mass protests that are likely the greatest Europe has seen in at least 60 years.

No one has been indicted in this catastrophe so far.

According to all available numbers, a good ten per cent of Serbia’s adult population participated in at least one of the thousands of gatherings and rallies that have dominated the country’s political and public life for the past almost two years.

SNS virtually went into hibernation for most of that time, after several attempts of counter rallies failed miserably. Just very early this summer, it slowly attempted to claw back public space which the protesters had occupied for months on end. The beginning of the campaign did not look all that promising. See this reportage.

According to Factor Plus‘ poll, SNS would come away unscathed. It would even slightly gain votes.

There are more credible stories.

Then there is the fact that Faktor Plus not only has been said to have close ties to Serbia’s regime and SNS itself. It has also not disclosed who commissioned the poll it published early next week.

Opinion researchers and pollsters don’t usually conduct such polls out of the goodness of their hearts. They make a living off that sort of thing. They want to get paid for their work.

True, given that Faktor Plus is a private entreprise mostly focussed on marketing research of any kind, the four election polls it has done since June may also serve to get them public attention – a marketing tool of its own of sorts.

But then there is the fact that the agency does not disclose the details of its election polls on its homepage. As a matter of fact, it does not publish them on its homepage at all.

That is a forrest of red flags.

How Do Polls Work in an Authoritarian System And Other Questions.

Then there is the general, and massive, caveat for political polls in Serbia in general. SNS and Vučić have established an authoritarian, though officially democratic, system over their 15 years in power. They control all the country’s relevant mass media to one extent or another. The last bigger independent outlets such as N1, Nova and Danas were effectively neutralized early this summer, when the media group holding them was sold to Alpac Capital – a media group fairly friendly to SNS and Vučić.

How honest are the answers interviewees give in any political poll in such a political climate?

Can we even except accurat-ish polling in a largely authoritarian regime?

This very much reflects in the number of polls even conducted.

In a country of comparable size, and given the importance these elections have in the eyes of virtually everybody in Serbia, one would expect several polls by different agencies and institutes every week.

It has been seven polls since the beginning of this year. Four were conducted by Faktor Plus.

The three conducted by other agencies all are from June and July.

Yet, all three of them significantly contradicted Faktor Plus’s results.

According to Nacija TV’s poll from July, Vučić‘ SNS and the Students were in a dead heat race with 44.1 percent and 41.6 per cent of the vote respectively.

Two other polls, commissioned by the Serbian Magazine for Political Theory, and the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA) and Stanford University’s Democracy Action Lab, each saw the Students‘ List ahead with 39.6 to 44.9 per cent respectively, with under 40 per cent for SNS.

Both were published in June and July.

Public mood may have shifted significantly since then.

This does not explain why a Faktor Plus poll from the same period puts SNS at 47 per cent, and the Students at under 31 per cent.

That’s a margin of more than ten per centage points.

(You can find the results of the aforementioned polls here.)

Outdated though these polls may be, this suggests that Faktor Plus‘ recent poll is far less accurate than it claims to be.

A Glass Bowl Seems More Accurate

Given all the caveats and red flags obvious to any reasonable observer, it is far too early to call Serbia’s general elections in four weeks just yet. A glass bowl seems a better instrument to predict their outcome than what few opinion polls are out there.

Then again, there is the nagging suspicion among many that SNS‘ election results may be helped should they not meet expectations.

It wasn’t just one observer that called the country’s latest general elections in late 2023 rigged. SNS has always denied the accusations.

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