Rapajic: Pressure on the Serbian community is increasing, local elections are a path to the normalization of life

The failure to constitute the Kosovo Assembly has led to even greater pressure on the Serbian community and to even worse living conditions. Things are happening now that were unimaginable until recently – people being expelled or threatened with the demolition of their homes. I hope this will motivate the Serbian community to turn out in greater numbers for the local elections, and that these elections will be a step toward normalizing life here, Aleksandar Rapajic, Program Director of the NGO Center for the Advocacy of Democratic Culture in North Mitrovica, told Kosovo Online.

Although the Kosovo Assembly has yet to be constituted and there is no new government, Rapajic believes that the campaign for the local elections will proceed without major issues.

“People here have, to some extent, gotten used to the fact that institutions don’t function and have begun to accept that they can’t rely on Kosovo’s institutions, which mostly create problems for them rather than helping,” he said.

According to his assessment, it is more favorable for the Self-Determination Movement if the local and potentially repeated parliamentary elections are held simultaneously, since the party tends to perform worse in local elections.

“In the last local elections, Self-Determination did very poorly. Aside from a few people in the government, they don’t have representatives in the municipalities, no prominent figures on their local lists, so they perform much worse in local elections. In the last local elections, they won in only four municipalities, two of which were quite small. That is why it suits Self-Determination for the local elections to be held together with the parliamentary ones, because they hope the support they have at the national level will carry over to the local level,” Rapajic said.