BELGRADE -- An opposition lawmaker and mother of two has vowed to continue her 11-day-old hunger strike to protest the fairness of Serbia's national and local elections this month, saying she has a duty to fight for democracy and the country's European future, rather than being in Russia's orbit.
Marinika Tepic and five fellow members of a newly united opposition Serbia Against Violence (SPN) alliance began their hunger strikes after President Aleksandar Vucic's election-night declaration of landslide victories for his ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) in the December 17 voting.
"I thought that I had not only the right to run for office and to be elected and to be the face of the [Serbia Against Violence] campaign, but also that I had a greater responsibility than anyone else to fight for this," Tepic told RFE/RL's Balkan Service in an interview from a couch on the third floor of a parliament building that houses Serbia's elections overseer, the Republic Election Commission.
She said public institutions had been turned into "accomplices" for what the opposition has alleged are fraudulent elections.
Student and activist protests have continued on a nearly nightly basis since the results were announced. A noon-to-noon blockade of downtown streets was launched on December 29 ahead of a planned demonstration the next day to demand that authorities disclose voter lists to help pinpoint alleged fraud.
Vucic has called the voting "the cleanest and most honest" in Serbia's history. International observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), however, concluded in their initial report that the national vote was conducted under "unjust conditions."
WATCH: Marinika Tepic, a member of the Serbian parliament from the opposition Serbia Against Violence party, is on hunger strike, demanding the annulment of the country's parliamentary and local elections, claiming electoral fraud.
The opposition and other critics of the voting are demanding nullification of the results and an international review of the vote, along with new elections within six months. Tepic said her hunger strike is an effort to sound an "alarm to the international community" toward that aim.
Earlier this week, eight days into her hunger strike, the 49-year-old Tepic was put on intravenous drips after her condition was said to have worsened. She was administered a solution intravenously during her interview with RFE/RL on December 28.
"I feel stable and I always say that this and this," she said, pointing to her head and her heart, "is at peace."
Tepic mentioned her own children and praised young people's activism in response to the vote. But she added that hearing that many young people are preparing to leave Serbia for political reasons is painful.
"I really can't live with that," she said, "and that is actually the biggest [source of] strength."
Serbia has seen a massive outflow of young people in recent decades, with the population falling by tens of thousands annually to well below 7 million this year in the post-Yugoslav republic.
Tepic is a former teacher and journalist who was first elected to Serbia's National Assembly, the country's unicameral parliament, in 2014. She has been deputy leader of the opposition center-left Party of Freedom and Justice since 2019.
She was a key player in the effort to unify the anti-Vucic opposition under the Serbia Against Violence banner for this month's elections after two mass shootings spurred public anger with the status quo in May.
One of the other protesters, Janko Veselinovic, the leader of the center-left Movement for Reversal, announced from a Vojvodina clinic on December 28 that he and fellow outgoing parliamentarian Danijela Grujic were abandoning their hunger strikes "on the doctor's advice." Veselinovic urged the public to attend the planned December 30 demonstration.
Another politician, Zeljko Veselinovic, ended his hunger strike for health reasons a day earlier. At least two other opposition leaders, Jelena Milosevic and Branko Miljus, remain on their hunger strike along with Tepic.
There has been an ongoing series of nightly blockades and protests since police forcibly dispersed a crowd outside the Belgrade City Council building on December 24. More than 30 people were detained after windows were broken, and police deployed tear gas to restore order.
Belgrade-based sociologist Dario Hajric highlighted the desperate plight of the anti-Vucic opposition and called hunger strikes "the last resort of the disenfranchised."
He said Tepic and the other opposition leaders' actions were an effort to force Serbia's leadership to "choose whether or not to persevere in the disputed issue and thereby risk the [hunger] striker's life." However, Hajric added, "I don't believe we are dealing with an authority that can be embarrassed in that way."
Vucic and his SNS party have ruled since 2012, and international watchdog groups warned ahead of the vote that state capture, media bias and saturation, and fearmongering and physical attacks against journalists and the opposition ensured them an incumbents' advantage.
Preliminary official results showed Vucic's SNS winning the national vote with nearly 47 percent versus SPN in second place with under 24 percent.
In the battle for Belgrade, neither party secured a majority in the 110-seat City Assembly. But the SNS's 40 percent outpaced Serbia Against Violence's 35.5 percent, allowing it to reelect Mayor Aleksandar Sapic with the help of its Socialist partners and a lone independent.
Vucic has insisted his SNS won fair and square.
Serbian prosecutors have announced an investigation into allegations of fraud and other electoral wrongdoing, including vote buying and falsifications.
In interviews with RFE/RL's Balkan Service, Bosnian Serbs have spoken about their participation in a carefully orchestrated scheme to fraudulently acquire residency documents so they could vote in Belgrade, as did a bus driver who said he transported voters to the Serbian capital from at least four Bosnian cities on elections day.
Bosnian nationals, including in the country's ethnic Serb entity Republika Srpska, may only vote in Serbian elections if they also have Serbian citizenship and residency. Serbian law doesn't prohibit transporting voters to polling stations unless it is provided in exchange for votes.
Vucic said people from Republika Srpska "have the right to vote in Belgrade based on the law on dual citizenship" and has rejected accusations that 40,000 voters from that region of Bosnia-Herzegovina voted. He said their number was under 500 and almost all of them had been on Serbian voter lists for years.
The OSCE's observation mission issued a long list of problematic factors in the voting.
"The December 17 early parliamentary elections, though technically well-administered and offering voters a choice of political alternatives," it said, "were dominated by the decisive involvement of the president (Aleksandar Vucic), which together with the ruling party's systemic advantages created unjust conditions."
The OSCE cited an erosion of public confidence due to the frequency of early elections -- these were the third parliamentary elections in four years -- as well as harsh rhetoric and media bias, pressure on civil servants, and misuse of public resources. They alleged that "oversight bodies for campaign and electronic media remained largely ineffective in deterring violations during the election period."
The OSCE experts also honed in on potential problems with Serbia's Unified Voter Register, including a failure to implement "long-standing" international calls for a full audit. They cited "allegations that numerous [deceased] persons, including abroad, remained in the [voter] register, along with claims of voter migration in connection with local elections, [which] diminished trust in its accuracy."
The security and monitoring body noted allegations of voters from abroad being bused in by the ruling SNS to cast ballots in Belgrade.
There are tens of thousands of ethnic Serbs in neighboring Bosnia, Montenegro, and Kosovo who have opposed those countries' independence from Serbia or the former Yugoslavia. Some still regard themselves as Serbian or part of a wider "new Serbian world."
Since the elections, the Montenegro-based Center for Research and Monitoring (CEMI) has initiated a consolidation and comparison of databases among Western Balkan states in an effort to prevent future instances of improper voting based on double residency.
"Otherwise, Vucic will decide on all the elections in the region -- Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Montenegro," Zlatko Vujovic, CEMI's director, told RFE/RL's Balkan Service.
Vucic has declared victory and dismissed accusations of wrongdoing, and called the international observers' conclusions "fabricated and orchestrated," without specifying any details. His SNS ally, Prime Minister Ana Brnabic, called the observers' findings untrue and an "attempt to destabilize Serbia."
Austrian Andreas Schieder, a European parliamentarian who was part of the international observer mission for the vote, said on December 28 that the European Parliament was "ready to support" an international probe, interparty dialogue, or mediation, but only "if both the government and the opposition" want it.
Schieder said that the Council of Europe, Europe's leading human rights body, has offered to organize a postelection mission to Serbia that would include training for better monitoring and control of activities before, during, and after elections. The Austrian politician said that so far he had heard "only bad words" from Vucic and Brnabic.
EU officials have tried to strong-arm Serbia into joining their sanctions regime to punish Russia for its unprovoked 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but Vucic has kept up Belgrade's resistance even at the risk of jeopardizing the country's EU candidacy. He has also maintained close diplomatic, defense, and trade ties with Russia.
Tepic also condemned the perceived trajectory away from the West and toward Moscow.
"We are fighting [to] become a part of the European family and not slip to the rank of a Russian governorate," she said.
