New govt. to have no excuse not to carry out reforms - panel

New govt. to have no excuse not to carry out reforms - panel

“With 157 MPs, the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) and (their leader) Aleksandar Vučić as prime minister will have a free hand to do what they have announced doing,” said Milan Ćulibrk, economic analyst and editor-in-chief of NIN, a Belgrade-based weekly.

“If their slogan was ‘With all strength into reforms’, now they have the MPs now to implement it,” he said at the panel titled “Political and Economic Expectations of a New Government – Possible Ruling Coalitions at National and Local Levels”.

He expressed the hope that the general public will learn about the reforms in question soon and that the government will deal with the budget revision first, as revenues are overestimated.

One of the key problems facing the government is resolving the issue of about 150 enterprises in restructuring that employ about 100,000 people and whose status is to be resolved by the end of the first half of this year.

“We can expect delays, which is not good, but it is not realistic to expect the job to be done in two months' time,” Ćulibrk said, adding that the government has to stop giving subsidies.

“Every government deserves (to be given) 100 days, but I think now it is not necessary,” he said, adding that it should adopt the announced laws by the end of June.

He said he thinks a big problem for the Serbian economy is that it has no product to sell.

Deputy Director of the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia (RZS) Miladin Kovačević pointed to four characteristics of the results of these elections.

The first is that one electoral list won an absolute victory, the second is that these elections saw the lowest voter turnout since 2000, the third is that a huge “wastage” of votes occurred, which suited the strongest list just fine, and the fourth is that the opinion polls underestimated the SNS list and overestimated the expectations of the election results of the Democratic Party (DS) and New Democratic Party (NDS) lists.

Kovačević said that the new government will find itself in a “tight financial situation” and that they need people who can manage the crisis and that the question of division of party prey is out of place.

“It is time to harness the full potential towards one single goal – to provide growth and development and to support export economy through the concept of reforms,” he said, and added:

"We must dispel the threat of further increasing public debt and create more employment opportunities, especially for young people."