The European Parliament Rapporteur for Serbia and Croatian MEP Tonino Picula assessed last night that Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and former President of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik have lost a strong patron in the EU after Viktor Orban's loss in the parliamentary elections in Hungary, which were held on April 12, regional television En1 reported, quoted by BTA.
“For Serbia under Vucic, Orban's Hungary was the member of the European Union that systematically defended all of Belgrade's destructive policies and prevented the Belgrade regime from being sanctioned in European institutions“, Tonino Picula told Croatian National Radio in response to a journalist's question about Orban's influence in the Western Balkans.
Picula added that “the concerns of the Vucic regime are best expressed by the pages of the tabloids, which are the face of the regime (in Serbia) and are under its control“.
“Nowadays they are trying very hard to explain how the Hungarian scenario cannot be repeated in Serbia”, commented Picula.
The Croatian MEP assessed that Vucic and Dodik are not actually interested in the accession of Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to the European Union.
“Vucic is somewhat protocolically pretending to be interested, only because of the money that is constantly flowing to him from Brussels, no matter what he does“, said Picula.
He assessed that he has “every reason to finally change not only the European Union's narrative towards Vučić's Serbia, but also what is much more important - politics“.
“The only language he understands is the language of financial pressure. He is not interested in closing the negotiating chapters, but in turning off the financial tap“, concluded Písula.
Regarding Orbán's failure in the Hungarian elections, Písula pointed out that the key factors to get there were “a critical mass of civil discontent and a clear alternative to Orbán's tyranny“.
“This time, even the entire catalogue of accusations against Brussels, the subversive activities of the opposition and the reliance on a system designed to be almost unchangeable were not enough for Orbán. In a clash with the electorate, he received the message of the people: "This cannot go on," the MEP pointed out.
Picula stressed that Hungarian voters had decided that "they were fed up with living in an environment of endemic corruption, a collapsed economy, isolation in the European Union and subservience to a Russian autocrat."