This is Popular Front, a podcast focused on the niche details of modern warfare and underreported conflict with me Jake Hanrahan. Today we speak to Yevana Maxich. She's a scientist, analyst and political

activist from Serbia.

She's going to be talking to us about the recent upset over there

where the government has allegedly but quite clearly

rigged the recent election and consolidated power

completely for himself which has led to attacks on opposition parties

clashes with protesters all sorts of stuff.

Ivana is going to explain what's happened.

If you like what we're doing here at Popular Front, support us at Patreon.com

slash Popular front. Before we go into the clashes that happened recently in Serbia let's go into why

they happened so this election this allegedly Let's go into that. What happened? So the most recent elections were basically snap elections and they were held on December 17th.

And here we saw the president Alexander Vutich and his Serbian Progressive Party or S&S taking victory.

But as you said, this victory was marked with very serious electoral fraud which then led to this wave of

protests. So one of the biggest concerns that was raised by the opposition and

also just citizens documenting this kind of stuff

was a really blatant manipulation of the voting process.

So some of the most blatant cases involved busing in about a hundred thousand people who don't live in Serbia,

but they came from Bosnia, they came from Montenegro, Macedonia, and they were basically paid to vote in Belgrade and also probably in other cities as well.

They were given fake ID cards, they were assigned addresses that don't exist while voting in a city, in a country,

and where they don't reside simply.

So other than that, we also witnessed countless cases of pressure intimidation, blackmail, all of this by

Routich's S&S party. We also saw a lot of saturation with

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