Political context

Back to the summary Report summary Next chapter Conduct of the elections: electoral institutions and actors

The last two weeks before the elections were marked by cases of violence that remained unresolved, attempts to discredit domestic and international observers, and an increasingly open use of state institutions for party purposes. Several candidate lists received support from abroad, while the space for independent reporting is narrowing further.

Violence, polarisation and stigmatisation

On 7 October, opposition councillors in the Belgrade City Assembly requested an extraordinary session with an agenda item on the dismissal of Mayor Aleksandar Šapić over his attack on Tatjana Mićić, a councillor of the Kreni-Promeni movement. Asked whether Šapić would be removed, Ana Brnabić had said as early as 5 October that the public would “see in the future what the SNS will do with Aleksandar Šapić as its member”. The session was not held on 13 October, because councillors of the ruling majority did not ensure a quorum, and its continuation was scheduled for 23 November, after the elections. Councillor Mićić, who stated that Šapić had attacked her on 28 September, underwent surgery for fractures of the nasal bones and jaw. According to the response of the Third Basic Public Prosecutor's Office in Belgrade, conveyed by Šapić's lawyers, pre-investigation proceedings are under way against him on grounds of suspicion that he committed the criminal offences of grievous bodily harm and violent behaviour. It is also disputed when the two pistols he legally owns were taken from him: according to the prosecution office, he handed them over voluntarily at home, while according to the official police note published by the Kreni-Promeni movement, they were seized at the police station. The prosecution office therefore opened a separate case concerning the conduct of the police.

Momčilo Marjanović, a long-standing activist of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), told BIRN how groups were organised and paid to engage in clashes, how people were planted among demonstrators so that incidents could be attributed to the students, and about “phantom” jobs in public enterprises. According to him, ahead of the protest of 15 March 2025 he saw “a lot of people” with revolvers in “Ćacilend”, and the police, as he claims, “protected and were in coordination with persons from Ćacilend”. He named Nenad Barac, director of the public utility company Novosadska toplana, as the person from whom he received instructions and cash. After the interview was published, Barac attended a session of the Novi Sad City Assembly, but did not answer questions about the allegations: asked by N1 whether he knew Marjanović, he said he would not talk “about thieves and fraudsters”, and he threatened opposition councillor Miran Pogačar, who had filed a criminal complaint against him, that he would “give him a hefty slap”. The Prosecutor's Office for Organised Crime initiated pre-investigation proceedings.

The stigmatisation campaign is directed primarily at the Student List and at Dejan Šoškić, former Governor of the National Bank of Serbia and a candidate on that list, whom Aleksandar Vučić presents as their candidate for prime minister. At a joint press conference with Ana Brnabić, Aleksandar Jakšić claimed that Šoškić had been elected full professor “on the basis of falsified reports”.

Pressure on civil society has also intensified. On 15 September, the organisation “Srpski suverenisti”, headed by Vukša Dragović, submitted an initiative to the Supreme Public Prosecutor's Office and the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government (MDULS) asking them to propose to the Constitutional Court that six citizens' associations be banned: CRTA, the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights (YUCOM), the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, FemPlatz, A11 and Civic Initiatives. The initiative cited as its basis a statement of 13 September by the Higher Public Prosecutor's Office in Belgrade, and claimed that on 15 March 2025 and in the following weeks these associations “worked on the violent overthrow of the constitutional order”. During this period Dragović received open support from the highest representatives of the authorities. On 8 October Ana Brnabić appeared on his podcast “Working Group” (“Radna grupa”), in a conversation about “the activities of non-governmental organisations” and “external pressures on the state”. Three days later, on the programme “Hit Tweet” (“Hit tvit”) on TV Pink, on which he appeared together with Aleksandar Vučić, Dragović described civil society organisations as a “para-political organisation” from which “we now have to defend the state”, and Vučić added that the situation was “even worse than that” and praised Dragović, asking: “How many people from the government dared to say anything?”

The pressure also extended to election observers. Aleksandar Vučić said on several occasions that CRTA were “direct participants in the colour revolution”, and Ana Brnabić asked the Agency for Prevention of Corruption (ACAS) to examine CRTA's activities. The stigmatisation also spread to international observers: Ana Brnabić sent the European Parliament an invitation to observe the elections only on 10 October, after the procedural deadline of 8 October had expired and two days before the final date until which the Parliament had been prepared to wait for the invitation, and a week later she announced a formal complaint about the composition of the delegation, describing it as “anything but impartial”.

State and party

Before his resignation, Aleksandar Vučić announced that he had pardoned or granted abolition to 49 persons, but the list has not been published, and he has publicly named only a group of 12 activists from Novi Sad. Even they, however, have no confirmation that they have been pardoned or granted abolition: the decisions have not reached the Higher Court in Novi Sad, and Željko Kočić, the lawyer of three of the activists, stated that he had received “neither a letter nor a postcard” from Vučić. A source in the Ministry of Justice who spoke to the Beta news agency claims that the ministry does not know whom Vučić pardoned and that it will not take part in implementing the decision, even though under the law abolition can be initiated only on the proposal of the Minister of Justice. Neither the higher courts in Belgrade and Novi Sad nor the Prosecutor's Office for Organised Crime have received the decisions. There is public speculation that those pardoned include former minister Goran Vesić, caretaker Minister of Culture Nikola Selaković and former State Secretary at the Ministry of the Interior (MUP) Dijana Hrkalović.

Ana Brnabić, who as Acting President of the Republic must call the presidential elections no later than 27 October, has not yet called them, and following Vučić's announcement that at least 50 per cent of mayors and municipal presidents would be replaced, there is also speculation about early local elections, so the ruling party continues to decide on its own when and at which level elections will be held, in line with its own strategy.

The Government's Office for IT and eGovernment announced that the voter register matches the civil registry records “almost entirely”, to which the Commission for the audit of the voter register responded that the Office's findings “are not the result of consistent application of the methodology” established by the Commission. Two weeks before the elections, the assessment of the register was thus given by a body of the executive rather than by the body legally responsible for the audit.

The weekly “Vreme” analysed a leaked database of the SNS party platform for organised activity on social media, published by the portal ocisti.net. According to that analysis, 1,241 users of the platform, who post, like and comment on content in favour of the SNS following instructions, logged in from the networks of 231 public institutions, ranging from municipal administrations to Elektroprivreda Srbije and the Republic Pension and Disability Insurance Fund, and in 94 per cent of cases did so during working hours, between 07:00 and 16:00. The detailed data cover the period from 2022 to 2024. According to research by BIRN, the Directorate for the Diaspora of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has paid at least 250,000 euros over the past three years to Serbian diaspora organisations in North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, including some that publicly promote the SNS.

International context

On 13 October, the Delegation of the European Union issued a statement on the conditions in the campaign, a departure from its previous practice. In the statement, it recalled that free and fair elections are a condition for progress towards membership, expressed concern about incidents of violence and welcomed the contribution of domestic observers to preserving the integrity of the electoral process, while the Head of the Delegation called on senior officials to tone down inflammatory rhetoric. In the same period, Montenegro closed three more negotiating chapters, and the European Union is preparing roadmaps for the four most advanced candidates, which do not include Serbia.

The Serbian Progressive Party, an associate member of the European People's Party (EPP), entered this campaign while a review of its membership was under way. The EPP announced that it would not publish the report on the status of the SNS before the elections, and none of its member parties has publicly supported the SNS.

The SNS received support from Russian President Vladimir Putin, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who addressed a rally in Novi Sad, and Milorad Dodik. Ivica Dačić, caretaker Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, met Dmitry Medvedev, Sergei Shoigu and Sergei Lavrov during an official visit to Moscow, and then, as leader of the Ivica Dačić - A Factor of Stability list, said that Russian officials had wished him luck in the elections. The European Serbia list was backed by the President of the Party of European Socialists, Stefan Löfven, and a number of European social democrats, while the Student List and the other electoral contestants received no formal support from foreign actors.

Back to the summary Report summary Next chapter Conduct of the elections: electoral institutions and actors

Violence, polarisation and stigmatisation

State and party

International context

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