Marinika Tepic, the Romanian-born opposition leader in Serbia, has gone on hunger strike to protest what she sees as “election fraud” in parliamentary and local elections held on December 17 and is demanding the results be annulled.

Marinika Tepic was born in 1974 in a family of ethnic Romanians from Pancevo. He graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade in 1995. He speaks Romanian and English.

She bore the surname Chobanu until she married Milan Tepic. Everyone has a child from a previous relationship. I have been living in Novi Sad since 2018.

He first worked as a high school teacher, and before joining politics, Marinika Tepic was a journalist for many media outlets in Serbia.

She entered politics in 2012 as a member of the League of Social Democrats (LSV) in Vojvodina.

He won his first term in the Serbian parliament in 2014, but decided to give it up to continue working in the provincial government of Vojvodina.

Two years later, she again won a seat in the Serbian parliament, but due to differences of opinion with LSV president Nenad Canka, she left the party in early 2017 and joined the party of Zoran Živković, the former Prime Minister of Serbia.

After the failure of the 2018 Belgrade elections, she left the party and became the vice-president of the Freedom and Justice Party, whose president is Dragan Đilas.

Marinika Tepic has been a parliamentarian for almost a decade and has been one of the most outspoken critics of Aleksandar Vucic and the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), the party of the populist president.

Marinika Tepic received a new parliamentary mandate in the Parliament of Serbia in 2022. She is a member of the Security Services Oversight Committee and the Defense and Home Affairs Committee.

The lawmaker who heads the list of the opposition coalition against President Aleksandar Vucic, whose right-wing nationalist party was declared the winner of the election, is demanding the vote be annulled and went on hunger strike on Monday along with six other lawmakers.

His health is “at risk”

His party said on Saturday that his health was “at risk” and that he needed daily infusions. But Marinika Tepic refuses to give up her fight. “I try not to think about it (death). I don’t see it as a sacrifice, but as a struggle and a way to keep myself alive,” says the 49-year-old woman, fixing her makeshift bed on a bench in the parliament building in Belgrade.

Doctors are “trying to keep me alive as long as possible because I have no intention of giving up until these frauds are undone, until they admit that there were election frauds, and until the will of the people is upheld,” he added. opponent.

The election drew a lot of criticism after a group of international observers, including representatives of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), condemned a number of “violations”, including “buying votes” and “inflating ballot boxes”.

“Electoral migrants”

Hundreds of people demonstrated daily in front of the Serbian election commission, and international criticism continued. Germany described the alleged fraud as “unacceptable” for a country hoping to join the European Union, the United States called on Belgrade to address the “concerns” of election observers, and the EU said “Serbia’s electoral process needs significant improvements and further reforms.” .

Despite the wave of criticism, the Serbian president remained steadfast. “I would like to ask all those who are on hunger strike not to do this. They can hold demonstrations every day, I am used to demonstrations,” he said in a televised address on Sunday.

On Saturday, Serbian prosecutors said they had asked police to investigate several alleged violations to determine whether there was enough evidence to file formal charges.

Numerous cases of alleged violations

Numerous cases of alleged violations were reported, including cases of “election corruption” and “vote buying,” the Belgrade prosecutor’s office said in a statement. Serbian police said on Sunday that a total of 344 complaints had been filed on election day and that in 18 cases investigators had found evidence of “illegal actions”.

But international observers also cited reports of “voters living abroad being bused by the ruling party to vote in Belgrade”. Tepic believes that President Aleksandar Vucic is behind this “importation of voters”.

“I think that Serbia is the only country in the world with the phenomenon of electoral migrants,” she says. “It’s like in the play Ubu Roy: when people stopped loving him, he decided to change people.” The president rejected these accusations, stressing that he will “defend the will of the people expressed in the elections.”

Thousands of people came to a protest in Belgrade

Thousands of people gathered on Sunday evening in Belgrade to demand the annulment of the results of the parliamentary and local elections.

On Sunday, police fired tear gas to disperse a crowd trying to enter Belgrade’s town hall, which houses the local election commission. Some protesters climbed into the building and broke windows. Others threw stones at the building.