President Vucic comments on new opinion poll, and ratings of student election list

President of Serbia and a member of the SNS party presidency Aleksandar Vucic said today that a new omnibus survey shows that the student, i.e. "blockader" (anti-government) election list's ratings are declining for the first time.

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"It's better than I expected, easier than I hoped and still with a lot of things that we have to course-correct, change, show more concern for the people, and so on. And as for whether we are in any way threatened by the 'blockaders' - it has all turned around. Even the ratings have," Vucic told Informer during the celebration of the SNS patron saint day (Serbian: Slava), when asked about a new omnibus public opinion survey.

The president stressed that it is "a great and good thing when you had minus 10 net positive and negative, while now it is back to plus 3.5."

"Now I'm back to plus 3.5 (rating) if I'm not mistaken, which is not normal after 14 years (in power), if I'm being honest. Normally when you have minus 20 you can win without much problems, but now it's plus 3.5 and they are at minus 20 and some down to minus 60. They have some (representatives) at minus 75 net negative, so they have four, five percent positives, and minus 80, therefore they are net minus 75, so you can look at that as an expression of the mood of the people," Vucic said.

According to him, "the student list" is in decline for the first time.

Vucic stressed when he receives the results of any survey, he first "hides" that from the party.

"Because when (SNS) people get the results, and especially if they're favorable, they tend to relax. They think that everything's fine, that the people love them, and that everything is simple. So I take that, hide it for myself, analyze the data, and inform them about what I want," said Vucic.

He added that there are those who started a campaign to relativize the current authorities' achievements.

"In less than a year, there will be a campaign in which they will say, 'Vucic, get out of Belgrade Waterfront, you stood in the way of building it'. And they will proceed like that. Just as they started their relativization campaign, so it doesn't matter who built the highways - that's our money. It has always been our money, and yet they (previous authorities) never even considered building a highway to Vranje, but were instead deceptive there around Nis and Leskovac where they had some voters, but had no interest in the rest," said Vucic.

He also noted that people are "fed up with politics".

"And you could (say), if you analyze the content over the last two weeks, that people are a bit fed up with all of us, fed up with politics. Sometimes they have to watch me for relevance, not because they love to, but people want to know what is happening in the country and see if there will be problems or not - but look at the drop in ratings of all political (TV) shows. What used to have an audience of 360-400,000 people, is now at 200,000, literally halved. People want to live normal lives, to return to everyday lives," said Vucic.

(Telegraf.rs/Tanjug)