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Članak Enlargement Package 2026 Quantification: SERBIA se pojavljuje prvo na European Policy Centre.

On 25 October, the Student List won 53.7% of the vote and 141 of the 250 seats, ending 14 years of rule by the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS); Vučić, who had resigned the presidency in September to lead his party’s list, conceded on election night. The Student List brought together public figures who were selected through votes in student assemblies (plenums) and vetted through a review process across participating faculties. Whether the breakthrough can also revive Serbia’s long-stalled European integration is a separate and harder question.

[1] Ćaci comes from a pro-government graffito telling students in blockade to go back to class, which misspelt đaci (pupils) as ćaci. The irony – regime loyalists lecturing students about school while unable to spell the word for pupils – was not lost on the protesters, who adopted ćaci as a mocking label for government supporters, implying they were semi-literate. The camp set up in Pioneers Park in March 2025 by a group calling itself “students who want to study” was duly dubbed Ćacilend. Vučić later embraced the term defiantly, declaring that he, too, was a

Članak Serbia’s Democratic Breakthrough se pojavljuje prvo na European Policy Centre.

In every identified case, the dismissed officeholder was replaced by an acting official, and no vacancy has been launched since. In all but one case (the Public Policy Secretariat), the replacement was installed at the same session as the dismissal, and in several cases, appointees came from outside the civil service, contrary to the CSL. The Public Policy Secretariat was instead left without leadership for three months. Both routes deny the institutions merit-based, tenure-protected leadership.

The practice extends beyond the central state administration. Between January and July 2026, six directors of cultural institutions, a public agency, and a public service were replaced in the same manner. These cases do not breach the CSL, which does not apply to the employees of these institutions, but they show a consistent method of asserting political control across the public sector.

This method rests on the routine misuse of acting appointments, which have become the default way of filling top management positions. In the latest PSHRM PAR Monitor 2024/25, 81% of SCS appointment decisions were identified as acting appointments,  while the European Commission reported that 62% of SCS positions were filled on an acting basis (as of September 2025). A mechanism designed as a temporary exception has thus displaced merit-based recruitment.

The problem is systemic and likely larger than documented, considering that materials from 31% of observed Government sessions were not published on the Government portal.

As a result of these practices, what began as politicisation of the SCS has become a deeper rule-of-law issue. The brief recommends that the Government state the specific legal ground in every dismissal decision and publish key materials from all its sessions. The Government and HRMS should end excessive and prolonged acting appointments and launch competitions for vacant SCS posts, with HRMS systematically collecting and publishing competition data. The Administrative Inspection should regularly review the legality of acting appointments.

Članak Unlawful Removal of Senior Civil Servants: Legal Uncertainty and the Undermining of Merit-Based Public Administration se pojavljuje prvo na European Policy Centre.

This affects a large number of people every year. In 2025, more than 29,000 marriages were concluded and over 10,000 divorces recorded, a large share of them involving a last name change. The burden falls in a large majority of cases on women – between 2000 and 2018, only 2,356 men took their wife’s last name – which makes a unified service a gender-responsive public service as well.

In the worst-case scenario analysed in this brief, re-establishing one’s identity requires five procedures for personal documents, one for registering a new residence, seven for data in registers and databases, and a “hidden” fourteenth: updating the eGovernment Portal account, without which most other online services remain out of reach. Only six of the 14 procedures can currently be completed online without a visit, and four only partly; the ID card, passport and vehicle registration certificate each require at least two visits to a police station; and fees, paid separately, total more than 14,000 RSD. Even finding out what you need to do is difficult: the Portal’s life event section only links to appointment scheduling, lists only four of the five documents in its part on marriage and says nothing about fees. Moreover, citizens’ obligations are spread across at least ten legal acts, with no official guidebook.

A focus group with six women and in-depth interviews with five showed how this plays out in practice: lack of coordination between institutions, repeated visits, carrying documents between institutions although the law obliges institutions to exchange them, and reliance on blogs and lawyers’ websites in the absence of clear instructions. All of this comes at an emotionally and financially demanding moment, in a change experienced as deeply identity-related.

To address these problems, the WeBER Policy Lab brought CEP together with the Public Policy Secretariat, the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Office for IT and eGovernment. At a design thinking workshop in May 2025, the participants co-created two prototypes – a unified e-service on the Portal and a unified request form for one-stop shops – and agreed that any solution must be accompanied by an authoritative guidebook for citizens, in print and digital form and written in simplified language. Although the research, the co-created design and donor resources were in place, testing and production have been postponed due to the prolonged political crisis.

Building on this work, the brief proposes two unified services, for personal documents and for data in registers, delivered online through the eGovernment Portal and physically through one-stop shops. The recommendations focus on:

• establishing both online and offline services based on the Policy Lab prototypes;
• updating the eGovernment Portal account automatically as soon as the new ID card with an electronic certificate is issued, while allowing users to start the service with their existing credentials;
• standardised requests requiring only basic information from the citizens, with a single itemised payment order, status tracking and SMS confirmations;
• strengthening inter-institutional data exchange and the application of the once-only principle;
• production of an official guidebook, “You have changed your last name – what now?”, staff training and a feedback mechanism reported on annually.

Članak After the Surname Changes: From Scattered Procedures to a Unified Life-Event Service se pojavljuje prvo na European Policy Centre.

The brief was finalised in the aftermath of Serbia’s October 2026 parliamentary elections, which brought political change and opened a window of opportunity to renew reform momentum and reset relations with Sweden and the EU. The lessons from the suspension are therefore examined not only in retrospect, but also as input for how bilateral and EU-level support can be calibrated so that this window translates into lasting institutional reform. This paper argues that the effectiveness of conditionality in EU enlargement increasingly depends on the actions of individual member states, whose bilateral approaches to the issue of backsliding can reinforce or undermine incentives vis-à-vis candidate countries. Finally, the brief offers a set of recommendations for the Serbian government, the EU, and the government of Sweden.

[1] Government Offices of Sweden, “Government to review Serbian reform support”, November 2025.

[2] Transparency International, “Corruption Perceptions Index 2025: Serbia”, February 2026.

World Justice Project, “Rule of Law Index 2025: Serbia”, October 2025.

[3] European Western Balkans, “Sweden Decides to Suspend Certain Forms of Support for Serbian State”, November 2025.

Članak When Conditionality Meets Backsliding: Lessons from Sweden’s Aid Suspension to Serbia One Year Later se pojavljuje prvo na European Policy Centre.

The findings arrive at a particular moment in Montenegro’s political life. The country is the most advanced candidate in the EU enlargement process, twenty years after an independence referendum whose outcome remains settled in law yet still contested in everyday political culture. Questions of nationhood, language and church continue to shape public debate, and accession itself presupposes a public sphere in which such disputes can be argued without sliding into accusations of betrayal.

Three themes run through the sample. The first is a substantial body of content that commemorates and glorifies individuals convicted of war crimes from the 1990s, delivered through funeral footage, tribute songs and archival imagery rather than explicit argument. The second concerns Montenegro’s own statehood, as content denies or ridicules a distinct Montenegrin identity, recasts independence as betrayal and revives historical labels for internal enemies. The third is a substantial strand on gender and sexuality, in which more than a fifth of all posts target women, feminists or LGBTIQ persons in the name of a “natural order.” Across all three, the material rarely presents itself as an argument that could be answered: it works through memory, humour and belonging rather than through claims that invite rebuttal.

The two focus groups recognised manipulation readily but responded to it in markedly different ways. Participants working in civil society organisations weighed each video against the limits of free expression, drew a clear line at explicit threats, and could name concrete channels for reporting hate speech to the police or state institutions. Participants from the general youth population were no less critical of individual claims, yet knew of no protective channel beyond the platform’s own reporting button, and described nationalist content as background noise they had grown numb to. Both groups tended to scroll past rather than report.

For Montenegro’s European path, these findings pointless to a need for new restrictions than to consistent enforcement of the rules already in place, and to building the procedural knowledge and media literacy that young people currently acquire only if they happen to work in civil society. A public sphere in which identity disputes are conducted without recourse to betrayal, and in which existing protections are known and used, is not incidental to accession; it is among the conditions the process itself depends on.

Članak The Digital Echo of Old Divisions: Youth and Radicalising Narratives in Montenegro se pojavljuje prvo na European Policy Centre.

The “Reform Agenda Updates” assessment focuses on the implementation progress of country-specific obligations under the RGF. Monitoring is conducted through a set of procedural, reform implementation, and financial indicators. The core of the monitoring exercise tracks reform steps with defined deadlines, assessing their implementation status based on publicly available evidence and official documentation obtained by national authorities, and, where relevant, complemented by information from independent institutions and civil society sources. Cross-cutting attention is given to stakeholder participation and transparency.
The monitoring exercise covers selected reforms organised into so-called “policy domains,” created by coding the sub-areas of the harmonised policy areas in the Reform Agendas. The selected policy domains, which enable regional-level analyses, benchmarking, and comparability, are supported by the available human resources and the thematic expertise of the Think for Europe Network (TEN).
For methodological notes and the reform steps selection process, see the draft methodology note at the.
The cut-off date for data collection and assessment for this update is 30.06.2026. Further policy developments may shift the status of currently pending reforms and will be reflected in subsequent updates.

Članak Serbia – Reform Agenda Updates – June ’26 se pojavljuje prvo na European Policy Centre.

The research took place in a tense political season. The observation period ran into the campaign for the general elections of 4 October 2026, which unfolded amid open disputes over the constitutional order and the powers of the entities, and it included Mladić’s death, the wartime Bosnian Serb commander convicted of genocide. Three decades after Dayton, the country holds EU candidate status, yet the first intergovernmental conference that would formally launch accession negotiations has still not taken place.

Three themes run through the sample. The first and by far the largest is the war of 1992–1995, which TikTok content keeps reopening through competing accounts of who attacked, who defended and who suffered, ranging from commemoration to the denial of the Srebrenica genocide and the celebration of convicted commanders. The second is the state itself, as posts promote secession, a third entity or unification with a neighbouring country, and recast domestic political rivals as threats to the community. The third is religion, used to mark ethnic boundaries and, in its sharpest form, to equate a whole faith with violence. Across all three, the content rarely invents new material. Its typical move is to take existing footage, from wartime archives to television interviews, and give it a new meaning through a caption or bacground music.

Both groups recognised selective editing, missing context and attempts to provoke, and both drew a clear line between remembering a crime and using that memory to mobilise the next generation. The participants from civil society organisations analysed how each video had been assembled, while the university students in the second group engaged more with whether they found the message convincing. Neither group saw itself as the main audience at risk; both located that risk among younger viewers who meet these stories without the background needed to question them.

For Bosnia and Herzegovina, the findings suggest that the digital space reproduces divisions already embedded in politics, schooling and family memory, and that it does so faster and with less context than any other channel. Responses aimed only at removing content will therefore reach a small part of the problem. What is needed is a shared, fact-based approach to the history of the 1990s in education, together with media literacy that teaches young people to ask where a piece of footage came from and what was left out. Both belong at the centre of the societal transformation that EU accession requires, since a state whose citizens cannot agree on the facts of the recent past will find it hard to build the institutional consensus that membership presupposes.

Članak A War They Did Not Live Through: Young People and Wartime Narratives on TikTok in Bosnia and Herzegovina se pojavljuje prvo na European Policy Centre.

The central finding is that the antagonism in the Serbian sample is directed inward rather than outward. Authoritarian and anti-democratic narratives form the largest category (43.1%), narrowly ahead of ethno-nationalist and identitarian content (38.6%); political opponents framed as “traitors” are the most common target, ahead of ethnic groups. Ethno-nationalist material is less frequent, but it is not lesser in consequence, since a larger share of it sits at the radicalising or mobilising end of the continuum. On the surface, moreover, little of this content appears overtly propagandistic. Radicalising ideas are conveyed through humour, lifestyle advice, calm “explanatory” videos, television and podcast clips, and short montages built around music and archival footage, formats designed to entertain or inform, not to provoke. The underlying intention, however, is often precisely to make hierarchy, hostility or distrust look ordinary: something to laugh at, something to admire, or simply something “everyone knows”. The Serbian digital landscape captured here is therefore shaped by two overlapping fault lines: a present-day struggle over who counts as a legitimate political actor and an older one over war, nationhood and historical memory, delivered in forms that rarely announce themselves as political at all.

It is this ordinariness, more than any single extreme post, that makes the Serbian sample difficult to police through conventional content moderation, and it is also what the two focus groups found hardest to see consistently. Participants active in civil society organisations tended to decode framing, aesthetics and manipulation almost on sight, while participants from the general youth population more often engaged with the surface topic and treated the content as harmless, silly, or relevant only to “other” people, usually older or less educated audiences. Neither group is simply resilient or simply vulnerable; the difference lies in what each was trained, by circumstance or exposure, to notice. It is this gap, and not a lack of scepticism as such, that media literacy programmes will need to close.

The findings of this report speak directly to Serbia’s European path. Legitimate opposition, independent media and a functioning space for public disagreement are among the political conditions the process is designed to build and protect. A digital environment in which everyday disagreement is routinely recast as betrayal works against exactly that objective, regardless of who currently benefits from it politically. For policymakers and practitioners working on Serbia’s EU path, this report’s findings suggest that resilience to digital radicalisation deserves the same sustained attention as the rule-of-law reforms it is meant to accompany.

Članak Radicalising the Everyday: Digital Narratives and Youth Perceptions on TikTok in Serbia se pojavljuje prvo na European Policy Centre.

FOTO: Kosovo Online

*The Kosovo designation is without prejudice to positions on status and is in line with UNSCR 1244 and the ICJ opinion on Kosovo Declaration of Independence”

This document has been published as part of the project “Supporting the EU enlargement through the normalisation process between Serbia and Kosovo: Civil society as a driver of progress” and supported by the Open Society Institute – Sofia Foundation (OSIS) through the “Think Tanks for the Future of EU Enlargement Program” (TFEP). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the authors only.

Članak Key Findings of the Shadow Report on Kosovo-Serbia Normalisation se pojavljuje prvo na European Policy Centre.

Three additional findings further illuminate these dynamics. First, the credibility mechanism is most pronounced among citizens who are otherwise predisposed toward EU integration. Individuals with stronger liberal-democratic and cosmopolitan orientations perceive the gap between the EU’s values and interests more acutely, resulting in a sharper decline in their support. Second, government-aligned and opposition-aligned citizens process EU-related information through different frameworks. The credibility mechanism has a meaningful effect only among opposition supporters, citizens aligned with the student movement, and politically neutral respondents, whereas the attitudes of government supporters are shaped almost exclusively by economic expectations. Third, the student movement, which has elevated issues of democratic governance closely connected to the credibility concerns identified in this research, has emerged as the second strongest political force in Serbia, surpassing all formal opposition parties combined. Consequently, if the EU is perceived as credibly supporting democratic governance requirements, it could enter a potential political transition with an existing constituency inclined toward European integration.

These findings suggest several implications for future EU engagement. Since the credibility deficit is rooted in the EU’s actions rather than in communication failures, the Union should prioritise consistency between its stated values and its policies. Resources should be shifted away from communication campaigns and toward programmes that provide citizens with direct experience of EU standards. Economic engagement, as the most powerful source of support, should become more visible at the local and individual level and should be explicitly linked to reform conditionality in order to reinforce rather than weaken the credibility channel. Pro-European citizens should not be regarded as automatically supportive; their backing depends on tangible evidence of commitment to rule-of-law standards rather than values-based rhetoric. Furthermore, the divergence between government-aligned and opposition-aligned audiences implies that a single communication strategy cannot effectively address both groups: while the former respond primarily to concrete modernisation benefits, the latter seek evidence that financial engagement is contingent upon genuine reform. Finally, the accession process itself must regain credibility by appearing achievable. A clear and staged roadmap would help address both the credibility deficit and the widespread disengagement arising from doubts that accession will ever occur, particularly if the EU demonstrates willingness to support a membership target date proposed by Serbia once the country exhibits genuine political commitment and a credible trajectory of reform.

Članak Geopolitics and Values: In Tension or in Tandem? se pojavljuje prvo na European Policy Centre.

Download the report per policy area:

Step reports Digital

Step reports RoL&FR

Step reports Green

Step reports BE&PSD 2

The report in Serbian will be available soon.

Članak First Independent Monitoring Report on the Implementation of the Reform Agenda se pojavljuje prvo na European Policy Centre.