Dear Ms. von der Leyen,

            I am addressing you regarding the open letter sent to you on 25 March 2022 by representatives of 38 non-governmental organizations and 36 professors in which they express great concern over the allegedly "pre-planned voter fraud" in the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections in the Republic of Serbia on 3 April 2022.

The reason I am addressing you is the fact that the letter contains insinuations and inaccuracies aimed impugning the current election process and justifying in advance the opposition’s possible poor results in the elections with alleged election machinations.

            The fact is that the election conditions, after the inter-party dialogue conducted in 2021, have been significantly improved and yielded solutions that the opposition does not have in other countries.

            Namely, all the participants in the elections will, as before, have the right to their representatives in all electoral management bodies. In accordance with the agreements reached in the inter-party dialogue, the standing composition of the Republic Electoral Commission for these elections has been expanded with additional 6 members and 6 substitute members, appointed at the proposal of the opposition.

            In addition to the right to representatives in the expanded composition of all the local electoral commissions and polling boards, the opposition was also given the opportunity to propose an additional member and substitute member in each of these bodies.

            The new election laws, which incorporate solutions agreed in the dialogue between the government and the opposition, significantly improved the system of protecting electoral rights, through the introduction of three-tiered rulings on objections to irregular voting at polling stations and extending deadlines for lodging legal remedies.

            In addition to the already mentioned fact that the representatives of the opposition will have the right to appoint over 300,000 representatives at a total of 8,267 polling stations, there is no doubt that the system of protection of suffrage will prevent or sanction any irregularities at the polling stations.

            Allegations of pressure on voters to vote for the ruling party and to take out ballots out of the polling station represent a brutal fabrication of lies, which I am obliged to point out to you, and at the same time remind the signatories of the open letter that the Republic Electoral Commission had prescribed the duty of the polling board to immediately inform the police about any suspicion that a voter had taken out his/her ballot paper from the polling station.

Everything I have stated in this address to you is intended to present the picture of the current election process from a significantly different angle than the one in which, in a one-sided and extremely political way, it was presented by the signatories of the open letter.

The open letter to you is an improper attempt to damage the reputation of our country by making fallacious claims, while completely ignoring everything that has been achieved in the last year through a dialogue between representatives of the government and the opposition.

Finally, I would like to point out that, regardless of the impropriety and malice of the signatories of the open letter which I had to react to, and the fact that voting will be conducted in by three times more opposition members at polling stations than members appointed by the ruling parties, as well as the fact that over 3,700 representatives of domestic and foreign observers have been accredited to observe the elections so far, we have nothing against expanding the capacities of the observation missions registered so far, because it is in our interest to observe the current election process as comprehensively as possible.

Please allow us to express our sincerest appreciation.