Full speech of Vukosava Crnjanski at the International Conference “In Effect, Do We Elect?”

Read the full speech of Vukosava Crnjanski, Crta’s  Director, at the International Conference “In Effect, Do We Elect?” in Belgrade held on 23. October 2024.

Dear guests and allies,

Thank you for being here and for joining us in trying to make this a good conference, to do something meaningful for elections – here, but also in other places where they are not conducted with integrity.

As CRTA, we find ourselves in an unusual situation where, for several months now, there have been no announcements of new elections, so this conference might be a way to cope with the withdrawal crisis. Joking aside, elections in Serbia in recent years have been frequent, some might even say unnecessarily frequent. The bigger problem, however, is that their quality is declining each time.

We often wonder how far the normalization of the unacceptable can go. How much media bias is acceptable, how intense the pressures on voters should be, how much can institutions be misused, before society, before we – the citizens, accept this as a normal part of the electoral process?

Elections are not a spectacle, and voters are not mere extras. If they are not a guarantee of our sovereignty as citizens, an expression of our power to change the government and choose different policies, then what are elections?

One could say that the guiding theme in creating the program for this conference was a quote from Andreas Schedler: Democracy is a “system in which parties lose elections”. In electoral autocracies, opposition parties lose elections.

Through panels and roundtables, we will seek answers to important global and regional questions. How can we recognize electoral autocracy and how can we resist it? How can voters be informed and protected from pervasive disinformation in a media environment that has been drastically altered by technology? Are there effective ways to combat political clientelism and electoral engineering?

We will also work on very concrete tasks – for example, finding solutions for the Voter Registry, in which citizens have lost trust. We, civic election observers from various countries, will exchange experiences from the front lines of the fight for free and fair elections.
There are many difficult questions about elections, especially in countries where the standard question – Who will win? – is not really being asked. Fortunately, there are wise people around the world who are dedicated to the topic of elections in different ways – academically, through activism, through journalism. I am happy and proud that many of them – many of you – will participate in this conference.

I am an incurable optimist. I believe that Serbia is a society with the potential to fight for free and fair elections and for democracy that is not merely a facade. Optimism requires a lot of work. I am confident that our joint efforts at this conference will bring us at least a few steps closer to the goal that CRTA is striving for.

Once again, thank you for this moment in which the international conference “In effect, do we elect” is officially open.