How citizens in Serbia see democracy, power and the vote
A single portrait of Serbian public opinion in June 2026: citizens who still believe in democracy but no longer feel they live in one, a state fused with the ruling party, and a protest movement whose demand for accountability is reshaping the vote - read down the page as one story, from democratic values to trust, protests, corruption, the ballot box and Serbia's place between the EU and Russia.
Serbia's citizens have not given up on democracy. Six in ten (59%) say democracy is preferable to any other form of government; only 15% think authoritarian rule can sometimes be better, and 21% say it makes no difference to people like them. That is the anchor for everything that follows on this page: the commitment to democracy as an ideal is broad and genuine - which makes the frustration in the next chart all the more telling.
What has eroded is not the ideal but the experience of it. Sixty percent of citizens are dissatisfied with how democracy actually works in Serbia (31% mostly, 29% very), against just 37% who are satisfied. And the mood is darkening: in a comparable February 2024 survey 55% were dissatisfied, so discontent has risen five points in little over two years. Read together with the previous chart, the message is clear - Serbs have not lost faith in democracy so much as confidence that the state is behaving democratically.
The guardrails citizens want
No rewriting the rules for a popular leader
Citizens draw a firm line at bending the rules for a popular leader. About two thirds reject the idea that a very popular government could change any law, including the constitution (65%), and a similar share reject letting a very popular president run for office without term limits (66%). In the public's view, winning an election is not a mandate to dismantle the constraints on power.
Parliament should keep its check on the president
The same instinct shows up on executive power: two thirds (67%) say it would be unjustified for the president to govern without oversight from parliament, even in a crisis, while 28% think it would be justified. The appetite for a 'strong hand' that overrides institutions is real but clearly a minority.
Tolerance for a ruler above the law keeps shrinking
Acceptance of an autocratic ruler - a president 'above the law', governing without oversight - has fallen steadily, from 44% in November 2022 to 31% in April 2025 and 28% now. Far from drifting toward strongman rule, the public has moved the other way.
Two parallel realities
The consensus splits by party
The two-thirds consensus against autocratic rule dissolves the moment you split the public by politics. Among ruling-party (SNS) voters, 78% see no problem with the president governing without oversight; among student-list supporters, just 2% agree. The same chasm runs by news source - acceptance reaches 72% among viewers of the commercial channels (Pink, Happy, Informer) and 58% among RTS viewers, against 3% among those who follow N1 and Nova S. On the most basic question of limits to power, the two electorates are not disagreeing at the margins; they inhabit different countries.
Same question, opposite answers
The same pattern holds for the constitution itself. Nationally only about a fifth accept overriding constitutional limits, but that rises to 58-66% among SNS voters and to 55-65% among audiences of the commercial pro-government channels, while it stays in the low single digits among followers of critically oriented media. What looks like a settled national norm is in fact propped up by one half of the country and rejected by the other.
Even the ideal divides by camp
The divide is not only about authoritarianism but about democracy itself. Democracy is called preferable by 85% of student-list voters but only 38% of SNS voters - and by 81% of those who follow N1 or Nova S against 34% of viewers of the commercial channels. Among the governing party's base and the media closest to it, it is not that most actively want autocracy; it is that a large share are simply indifferent to whether the system is democratic at all.
The collapse of trust in political institutions
Furthest from power, most trusted
Trust in Serbia is distributed along a single fault line: the closer an institution sits to party politics, the less it is trusted. State universities (71%) and the Serbian Orthodox Church (63%) top the list; the police, civil-society organisations and the judiciary cluster in the low-to-mid forties; and the elected political institutions sit at the very bottom - the Government and National Assembly around a third, political parties trusted by just 19%. It is a striking inversion for a democracy, where the institutions meant to embody popular will are the least believed in.
Steepest decline at the top
Behind those levels is a steep decline. Trust in the institution of the President has nearly halved in three years - from 60% in February 2023 to 40% in April 2025 and 35% now - the sharpest fall of any institution measured. The Government (49% to 34%) and the National Assembly (36% to 31%) have slid too, so the erosion is not about one office but about the elected core of the state as a whole.
The president is known, the prime minister is not
The point is underlined by a simple recall test: only 53% correctly name the current prime minister (Đuro Macut), while 41% do not know and 6% name someone else. When nearly half the public cannot identify the head of government, it says a great deal about where real authority is understood to lie.
The protests hold
A year and a half without slipping
The student protests remain a majority cause. Fifty-nine percent of citizens support them and 34% are opposed - and support has barely moved for a year and a half, from 61% in December 2024 through 64% in February 2025 to 59% now, even as the protests are held less often than at their peak. This is not a fading moment but a settled feature of public opinion, and the near-absence of 'don't know' answers shows how few citizens remain on the fence.
Bigger than any single party
Crucially, the movement is bigger than its electoral vehicle. Backing for the protests (59% overall) reaches a majority of undecided voters (70%) and even of abstainers (56%), and rises above 80% among social-media and portal users - well beyond the share who would actually vote for the student list. The protests function as a broad civic current rather than a partisan project, which is part of why they have proved so durable.
Wary of how the state responds
Concern about how the state polices the protests is widespread: 62% are worried about the use of police force against demonstrators (42% very worried), against 34% who are not. Concern peaks among the young - around four in five of those under 30 - and ruling-party supporters are the only group in which a majority are unconcerned.
The official account is widely doubted
On one of the most contested episodes of the protest year, a majority take a clear view: 52% see the disturbance in the crowd as a deliberate tactic to intimidate demonstrators, far outnumbering the 7% who call it a justified security measure.
Corruption seen as systemic
A problem both sides agree on
Corruption is not just a complaint; it is, for many, the defining problem. Half of all citizens (50%) place it at the very top of a 0-to-10 seriousness scale, with answers piled up at the high end. And unlike almost everything else on this page, the judgement holds across the political divide - even ruling-party voters do not deny it, though they are somewhat less emphatic.
Blame falls on the system, and on those in power
Asked to assign responsibility, citizens point less at individuals than at the machine itself. The entire political system is named by 38%, well ahead of the current authorities (16%), Serbian 'culture and mentality' (13%) or the previous government (12%). Corruption is read as built into how power works, not as the failing of any single actor - which sets a high bar for any fix short of systemic change.
Elections and the political landscape
Most say no
Distrust now extends to the mechanism of democracy itself. A clear majority (55%) judge the March 2026 local elections not free and fair (34% not at all), against 34% who think they were. Placed next to earlier readings - 41% for hypothetical new elections in December 2024, 50% for the December 2023 parliamentary vote - the trend points one way: confidence in the integrity of elections is eroding, not recovering, which raises the stakes for every vote to come.
Protest energy reaches the ballot box
That distrust coexists with a genuinely competitive field. Among decided voters - about 70% of the public - the student list leads with 44.9% to the Serbian Progressive Party's 35.7%, with no other actor clearing the threshold on its own. The civic energy behind the protests is converting into electoral weight, even as 12% remain undecided and 9% say they would not vote at all.
Looking outward: the EU and Russia
Leaning west, but only just
On foreign policy the country tilts west, but only just. More citizens lean toward closer ties with the EU (42%) than with Russia (30%), while 21% would prefer neutrality and keep their distance from both. It is a plurality for Europe rather than a settled majority - and, as the next chart shows, an average that hides two very different Serbias.
The domestic fault line again
And the divide is sharpest of all along political and media lines - the very fault line that runs through the rest of the page. Just 15% of ruling-party (SNS) voters want closer ties with the EU against 60% who favour Russia, while student-list supporters are almost the mirror image at 75% to 10%. Audiences of the public broadcaster (RTS) and the commercial channels (Pink, Happy, Informer) lean heavily toward Russia (56% and 61%), while followers of N1 and Nova S (69%), social networks (62%) and online portals (58%) lean just as heavily toward the EU. Foreign policy, in short, is an extension of the domestic divide, not a separate question.
Young and educated tilt to Europe
The headline number splits cleanly along the lines of age and education. Among 18-to-29-year-olds, 62% lean toward the EU and only 15% toward Russia; among those 65 and older the balance inverts, with 52% favouring Russia and 22% the EU, and a similar reversal separates the least- and most-educated citizens. Serbia's orientation to the world, in other words, is less an east-west argument than a question of which generation you belong to.
Public Opinion Surveys
Since 2013, CRTA has continuously conducted and commissioned public opinion surveys on citizens’ attitudes toward democratic processes and the functioning of political institutions in Serbia.
2026-06 Attitudes of Serbian citizens CRTA-Stanford
