Campaigning without the paperwork

The observation findings show that in a series of key areas the state and the ruling political party have become almost entirely identified with one another. The changes on the legislative, institutional and media fronts during the pre-election period, and their role in deepening the inequality between future electoral contestants, are deeply concerning.

Many previously observed trends - the misuse of public resources, media inequality, the establishment of direct or indirect political control over the media, the propagandistic discrediting of political opponents, clientelism and corruption, pressure on voters, the compromised state of the voter register, the weakness of institutions in protecting voters' rights and the integrity of the electoral process, and the influencing of citizens through one-off financial measures from the republic budget - reached critical proportions during the pre-election period.

Conditions of this kind produce a systemic advantage for the ruling party, call into question the fairness of political competition, and endanger the right of citizens to form and express their choice without pressure and with access to complete and truthful information.

Of particular concern is the new and serious politicisation of the state's security and repressive apparatus, deployed to intercept the communications of the authorities' political opponents. Independent expert examinations, both domestic and international, have confirmed that since the beginning of 2026 the telephones of at least 14 members of the Student Movement and of the opposition parliamentary party the Green-Left Front were infected with the controversial Pegasus spyware.

This aggressive surveillance must also be viewed in the context of the ongoing media campaign surrounding the "colour revolution", raising concerns that it represents a politically motivated threat to electoral competition rather than measures justified under the Constitution and the law. Since the beginning of the year, CRTA observers have recorded more than 1,300 manipulative headlines in the teasers of the main television news programmes and on newspaper front pages alone, almost half of them aimed at discrediting political opponents, with an intensification in August.

This campaign is further encouraged by irresponsible statements from the most senior representatives of the authorities - including the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, and the Speaker of the National Assembly, Ana Brnabić - to the effect that political opponents will incite violence on election day. Such statements create an atmosphere of fear, deepen inequality ahead of the coming campaign, and undermine citizens' confidence in electoral integrity and in the very institutions whose role is to protect the elections and citizens from scenarios of this kind.

Many political actors targeted by these discrediting campaigns therefore did not respond to President Vučić's parallel calls for social and political dialogue, which he made through the media during the observation period. Those invitations resulted only in talks with the parties of the ruling coalition. Dialogue of this kind is not a substantive response to the social and political crisis, but another in a series of political tactics.

There have also been significant changes in the judiciary, as well as personnel changes in the police, which raise questions about the risk of deepening political influence in these institutions. During this period the criminal complaint against unidentified persons who on election day in 2023 attacked and injured CRTA observers in the yard of a local police station was dismissed for lack of evidence.

The authorities presented the summer amendments to the electoral laws, to the Law on Prevention of Corruption and to the Law on Financing of Political Activities as the fulfilment of ODIHR's recommendations. CRTA Election Observation Mission assesses that those amendments created the conditions for eight of the 54 recommendations from the 2023 and 2024 elections to be fulfilled - of which only one is a priority recommendation. It concerns the provision governing officials' public appearances during the campaign, whose real effects will only be capable of assessment in practice.

The adopted amendments bring limited improvements but do not resolve the chronic problems, while some of the provisions may further deepen the inequality between actors. The limit on permitted annual donations by natural persons to political actors was reduced sixfold. The threshold for tax control was also lowered. New, extra-parliamentary actors have thereby been placed in an unequal position relative to parliamentary parties, which have additional sources of income at their disposal - including budget funds and the possibility of borrowing. The introduction of a cap on election campaign expenditure is a positive step, but the maximum permitted amount of six million euros has been set at the level of the Serbian Progressive Party's average spending at parliamentary elections from 2016 to 2023 - a sum that other electoral contestants have so far found unattainable. Mandatory training for polling board members will be a condition for their appointment from January 2028 and will not apply to the coming elections. The new rule under which a single voter may support the candidacies of several candidate lists opens space for the tactical multiplication of the number of candidate lists.

The ruling coalition plans to increase its advantage in the financing of both regular operations and the election campaign still further, through extraordinary payments from the republic budget. A practice familiar from earlier elections is now without precedent. Through just two of the several announced one-off financial measures, the authorities will pay out almost one billion euros in cash to the citizens of Serbia. This sum is double each of the comparable packages disbursed ahead of the 2022 and the 2023 election campaigns, and it will be paid out during the election campaign itself if election day falls on 25 October. The prevalence of a clientelist approach to voters in this pre-election period is also indicated by the fact that every seventh of all the Serbian Progressive Party activities CRTA Election Observation Mission recorded across Serbia had elements of clientelism - from the distribution of parcels and major household appliances to other material benefits.

Because the competent institutions spent months delaying, obstructing and withholding access to the necessary data, no comprehensive audit capable of confirming the accuracy and integrity of the voter register will be carried out by the legal deadline of 28 October. The upcoming elections will therefore be yet another election in Serbia held without a prior audit of the voter register. In August 2026, CRTA Election Observation Mission documented serious indications that the Serbian Progressive Party had been unlawfully holding and collecting the personal data of citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina who also hold Serbian citizenship, in order to register them to vote abroad outside the law and before any elections had been called.

Should snap elections be called at this moment, they will be met by a complete absence of media regulation. The Regulatory Authority for Electronic Media (REM) has been non-functional for 22 months, and there is still no end in sight to the political deadlock that has left the REM Council without an elected president and without the ability to take decisions.

In parallel with the REM deadlock and the alarming spread of problematic content in the media, over the past eight months CRTA has recorded at least nine major interventions in the media market, in editorial policy and in the programming line-ups of telecommunications operators. All these changes share a common feature: a further concentration of the media space in the hands of owners close to the ruling majority, preferential treatment for media that favour the ruling party, and the gradual exclusion of operators and channels publicly regarded as critical of the authorities. Between January and September 2026 the following took place: (1) the sale of the media arm of United Group's business; (2) the further expansion of Telekom Serbia in the cable operator market; (3) the takeover of the cable operator SBB; (4) the change of leadership and editorial management at the public media service Radio Television of Serbia (RTS); (5) the sale of local television channels; (6) the sale and establishment of new local online portals; (7) the takeover of Total TV by Telekom Serbia and the integration of its subscribers into Telekom's satellite platform, with the removal of certain channels, including N1 and Nova; (8) a pilot project through which the channel line-up of an unknown number of Yettel subscribers was changed by switching off certain channels, including N1 and Nova S, compensated by a reduction in their bills; and (9) the six-month opening of 30 television channels for free viewing via aerial, among them Informer TV, Kurir TV, Blic TV, K1 and Euronews Serbia, without licences for that coverage.

Monitoring of RTS's main news programme Dnevnik 2 showed a further widening of the gap in the time devoted to actors of the authorities and of the opposition: the ruling majority receives 96 per cent of that time and the opposition just 4 per cent. President Aleksandar Vučić was by far the most present political figure in Dnevnik 2 between April and August 2026 - he received more than half of the total time devoted to all political actors, which is almost four times his presence in Dnevnik 2 during the pre-election period and the campaign for the 2022 presidential elections. The time devoted to positive reporting about President Vučić was more than 11 times longer than in 2022, and the share of positive tone rose from 18 to 51 per cent.

Since the beginning of the year President Vučić has addressed the public through television cameras more than in the same period in previous years - on average more than once a day. Between January and the end of August, 371 addresses were recorded, almost a third of them in August alone. By way of comparison, the holder of the nominally strongest executive position in Serbia, Prime Minister Đuro Macut, had given just nine interviews and television appearances by the day the proposal to dissolve the National Assembly was publicly submitted, on 7 September.

President Vučić's already extensive presence in the public sphere was further amplified by a parallel nationwide tour, in the course of which his addresses frequently went beyond the powers of the President of the Republic, dealt with matters falling within the competence of the Government of Serbia and its ministries, and spoke negatively about political opponents. It also remains unclear who organised the events that made up the tour - the state or a political party - and whether the authorised institutions, including the Agency for Prevention of Corruption, are exercising oversight of compliance with the law.

These phenomena, which encourage the erasure of the line between the state and the party, are not a set of isolated activities by individual actors: this is a pattern, visible through the volume of the data and in other fields as well. In the last four months alone, CRTA Election Observation Mission recorded more than 1,200 activities of senior state officials, of which 18 per cent contained elements of the misuse of public resources and public office. The line between the institutions and the party was deliberately blurred: state officials appeared at openings, health campaigns and household visits which were formally not party rallies but which carried recognisable promotional content - banners, slogans and T-shirts bearing the name of the announced candidate list "United Serbia".

CRTA formalised specific elements of a possible breach of the law through an initiative submitted to the Agency for Prevention of Corruption concerning the "United Serbia" rally in Užice on 29 August. On that occasion, President Vučić urged citizens to vote for the list and spoke about securing an election victory. CRTA asked the Agency to establish whether the Law on Financing of Political Activities had been breached, on the suspicion that funds intended for the party's regular operations were used for electoral activities before a dedicated account had been opened - an account which by law is opened only after the elections are called. Further questions of lawfulness are raised by the organised distribution of the President's letter to pensioners and recipients of social benefits through the Republic Fund for Pension and Health Insurance and Post of Serbia, in the course of which, according to the mission's findings, personal data were collected from citizens - telephone numbers and signatures - without any clearly stated purpose or retention period. Besides this initiative, CRTA also submitted seven complaints to the Agency; as of the publication of this report their outcomes are unknown.

Set against the coordinated institutional and party activity of those in power, the most organised new actor to emerge in the opposition space is the Student Movement, whose activities were recorded in half of the towns and municipalities in Serbia. The movement has built its own field infrastructure (the "A Student in Every Village" campaign, training for polling board members) and is seeking to connect with broader social groups. It is precisely that visibility that also makes it the most exposed target: it is the most negatively portrayed actor on RTS (58 per cent negative tone), and its representatives and supporters face physical attacks and pressure without an adequate police response (Mionica, Bor). The strongest coalition at the previous parliamentary elections, Serbia Against Violence, did not act as a unified bloc during this period, because its member parties do not share the same positions on the coming elections - some parties support the Student List, some are forming the Platform for a European Serbia, some are forming the "People's Serbia" alliance, and some are running independently. Even so, the activities of these opposition parties were recorded in at least 50 municipalities, though predominantly as localised initiatives.

From May to September, on average almost every other day saw one verbal or physical incident connected with citizens' political engagement in local communities. The most dramatic incident occurred in Užice on 29 August, ahead of the Serbian Progressive Party's rally in that city. The clash broke out when the rally's stewards attempted to move citizens out of a café's outdoor seating area on Partizan Square, after which several supporters of the authorities physically attacked the assembled citizens. At least two people were injured. Allegations were made publicly that members of the police were among the attackers, but their identity and status had not been established by the time this report was published.

Taking into account that the pre-election environment is marked by the erasure of the line between the state and the party, which deepens already familiar practices of misusing public resources and institutions; that a culture of impunity has led to new breaches and to the disregard of rules; that the inflammatory rhetoric of public officials and of the most influential media goes beyond the heat of political contest and encourages intolerance towards political opponents; that the most senior state representatives are persuading the public that their opponents want the outcome of election day to be violence, together with the circumstance of rising violence between opposing sides during the pre-election period; the fact that the absence of pluralism in the media has deepened; that serious allegations of pressure on citizens have been recorded, as have allegations of the misuse of official records containing citizens' personal data; that the audit of the voter register will not be carried out; and that there are new suspicions of manipulation of the voter register - all of which endangers the integrity of, and citizens' confidence in, the coming elections - CRTA Election Observation Mission calls on: