National minority council elections: 52 lists and 1,056 candidates on the 8 November ballot

On 28 October 2026, the Republic Electoral Commission (RIK) established the collective electoral lists for the elections for members of the national minority councils, to be held on Sunday, 8 November 2026. Voters will choose between 52 electoral lists with a total of 1,056 candidates, competing for seats on the 21 councils whose members are elected directly. The decisions were published in the Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia, no. 104/2026.

Each collective electoral list sets the order in which the lists appear on the ballot, which is the order in which RIK certified them. The number of lists differs considerably between communities. The Ashkali council has five lists; the Albanian, Bosniak, Macedonian and Ruthenian councils have four each; the Bulgarian, Bunjevac, Croatian, Czech and Greek councils three each; and the Hungarian, Montenegrin, Romanian, Slovak and Ukrainian councils two each. In six councils - the Egyptian, German, Polish, Roma, Slovenian and Vlach - only one list stands. Together, these six communities account for 90,739 enrolled voters, two thirds of them in the Roma special voter register.

The special voter registers were closed on 23 October 2026. According to the RIK decision on the number of ballot papers, 478,753 voters are enrolled for the direct elections, and 481,157 ballot papers have been printed, including a reserve of 0.5%. The largest registers are those of the Bosniak (114,080) and Hungarian (108,317) communities, followed by the Roma (60,965) and Albanian (37,304). The smallest is the Polish register, with 298 voters.

This figure replaces the one cited in CRTA.Plus's explainer on these elections, which reported 442,884 voters at the provisional closing of the registers on 16 September; enrolment continued until 23 October. The final figure is higher than in 2022, when 456,199 voters were entitled to vote in direct elections, but only because 21 councils are elected directly this year instead of 19. The Macedonian, Croatian and Montenegrin communities crossed the threshold of 40% of their members enrolled in the special voter register, while the Russian community fell below it. Comparing only the communities that voted directly in both cycles, enrolment fell from 453,106 to 435,478. This is a decline of roughly 17,600 voters, consistent with the trend recorded between 2018 and 2022.

The Gorani and Russian councils are elected by an electoral assembly rather than by voters at polling stations, so no electoral lists stand for them in this procedure. RIK has set the number of ballot papers for the two electoral assemblies at 51 in total, 30 of them for the Russian assembly.

The collective electoral lists also record each candidate's year of birth, which the decisions certifying the individual lists do not. The youngest candidate was born in 2008, the oldest in 1940. Further background on the electoral process is available in CRTA.Plus's section on elections and voting integrity.