Serbian Fact-Checker Deems Most Vucic Claims False

Serbia's fact-checking web portal Istinomer has taken a dim view of the Serbian President's record for telling the facts.

After it analysed 33 statements Aleksandar Vucic has made since being sworn in as Serbia's President on May 31, 2017, it has rated only 9 per cent of them as correct or true.

Most of those rated as false or incorrect related to Serbia's alleged economic progress.

"We heard from Vucic that Serbia has the highest economic growth in the Western Balkans, that more murders were happening in the 1990s [than now], and that we will have built more kilometres of highway than Croatia. None of that came to be," Istinomer said in its analysis.

It noted that while Vucic claimed Serbia's economy was growing faster than the European average in 2017 [July 24, 2017, daily Blic], its GDP actually grew two times slower than the EU average.

It noted further that while Vucic claimed Serbia had the highest economic growth in the Western Balkans in 2016 [September 4, 2017, TV Happy], in reality, Croatia, Albania and Kosovo had higher growth.

"Readers of Istinomer voted this statement to be the [biggest] lie of 2017," Istinomer said.

Vucic had also misled the public about the real state of the economy before he became Prime Minister in 2014, it added.

He had claimed that Serbia's public debt at the time had been 77 per cent of GDP [december 4, 2017, TV Happy] - when in fact it was 62.5 per cent, rising to 70 by the end of that year.

He had claimed that the average salary had been 356 or 340 euros [July 28, 2017 and April 18, 2018, RTS], when in fact it was 386 euros. His statements also ignored the fact that his Progressive Party had been in power since 2012.

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