Our party congratulates the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia (NKPJ) and the Union of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia (SKOJ) on their recent success in Serbian elections.
Despite discriminatory laws which aim to prevent real working-class representatives from electoral participation, the NKPJ was able to participate by including seven candidates on the Russian party’s list. This was the first time in 19 years that the working class of Serbia was given an opportunity to vote for communists.
As a result of the joint efforts of communists and the ethnic Russians who make up the Russian party’s base, the list received more than 11,000 votes, gaining one parliamentary representative as a result. Since the Russian party has never previously managed to meet this threshold, the newly-elected assembly member effectively owes his election to communist campaigning and communist votes.
One Russian party candidate was also elected to the assembly of the autonomous province of Vojvodina and to the Kragujevac city assembly. This positive result, the best the NKPJ has had since the 1990s, was achieved despite attempts by hostile quasi-leftists to organise a boycott of the elections.
Why participate?
The NKPJ took the decision to engage with the Russian party in this way as a result of their shared positions on some of the key issues of our times, and their desire to use the elections to take this programme to the working people.
Both the Russian party and the NKPJ are opposed to Serbia’s accession to imperialist alliances such as Nato and the European Union (which the NKPJ describes as “the dungeon of the peoples”). Both parties advocate instead for the strengthening of comprehensive cooperation with fraternal Russia and the Brics countries.
Both NKPJ and the Russian party consider Kosovo and Metohija to be an integral and inalienable part of Serbia. Both of them categorically oppose the introduction of sanctions against Moscow following the launch of the special military operation in Ukraine.
Both parties are also inheritors of the antifascist traditions of Serbia and the wider Yugoslavia from the period of the second world war, and continue to honour and commemorate those pivotal events.
Prospects for the country
The overall result of the 17 December election was the re-election of the Serbian Progressive party, which can be expected to continue to implement an anti-people and anti-worker programme in the service of big capital.
The government’s service to western monopolies has already compelled Serbia’s entry into the European Union and is pushing it towards increasing cooperation with Nato. Aptly described by the NKPJ as “the striking fist of western imperialism”, it can never be forgotten by the masses of the former Yugoslavia that Nato was the vicious warmongering alliance that inflicted horrendous devastation on their country in 1999, and which remains in occupation of the southern Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija to this day.
Still, attempts by the Progressive party government to keep the people on side by maintaining cordial relations outside of the western camp have drawn the ire of the west. The more extreme war hawks in the EU and Nato, ever ready to put down even the slightest semblance of independence in their vassals, would appear to be backing claims of ‘election fraud’ being made by an even more reactionary set of compradors.
With all the hallmarks of yet another colour revolution brigade, the members of the ‘Serbia against violence’ election list, having failed to achieve their expected win in Belgrade’s city election, are demanding the annulment of the election and their own installation as rulers of the country.
To support this claim, the ‘no violence’ rabble have been organising violent and destructive demonstrations in Belgrade, which have been endorsed as a ‘pro-democracy’ struggle by western media.
The NKPJ has strongly condemned these violent protests, as well as the shameful efforts of the opposition leadership to push Serbia into imposing sanctions on the Russian Federation and towards withdrawing from its current cordial political and economic relations with the People’s Republic of China – demands that are diametrically opposed to the best interests of the country and its people.
The party and its youth league have declared their continued intention to work for the unification of all really progressive and patriotic organisations in Serbia against western imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation.
