Belgrade: The United Serbia (JS) leader Dragan Markovic said yesterday that new elections should be called if no new government is formed by Thursday.

Markovic said, “In Serbia, everything’s always left till the last minute. Parliament’s constitutive session has been called for Wednesday and we ought to have a majority by Thursday. Serbia is not someone’s estate, and that’s why it should have a government whose criteria is competence, not suitability.”

Markovic said that he still believed that he and his coalition partners, the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) and the Associated Pensioners’ Party (PUPS) should form a government with the Democratic Party (DS), and that formation of the government should not be delayed, because politicians were not “new faces” to each other, and knew perfectly well what policies each others’ parties espoused.

The JSS leader said that everything would become clearer after the SPS’s talks with the Radicals and the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), in which he personally would not be taking part.

He said that the SPS expected the DSS to explain which parts of the Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) they found contestable, while PUPS were waiting to know which funds would be used to finance the pensions increase.

Markovic said that there was no need for him to confer with his coalition partners ahead of the meeting in question, because the SPS-PUPS-JS coalition was united and insisted on continuing the process of European integration.

He said that his political platform three months ago had been ratification of the SAA, and that he had entered the coalition with the SPS and PUPS on that self same platform.