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.

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.

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.

Članak Western Balkan PAR Monitor: POLICY DEVELOPMENT AND COORDINATION 2024/2025 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 TEN network.  

For methodological notes and the reform steps selection process, see the draft methodology note at the link. 

The Reform Agenda Update is structured as follows. The Key findings and recommendations provide a high-level summary. The Legal and Institutional Arrangements and Requests and Release of Funds sections monitor overall progress in the procedural and financial aspects of implementing the Reform Agenda. The last section, Reforms in Focus: Reform Monitor policy domains, provides independent monitoring findings on selected reforms. Here, each section provides a narrative snapshot of progress and obstacles in implementing Serbia’s Reform Agenda.

The cut-off date for data collection and assessment for this update is 31.12.2025. Further policy developments may shift the status of currently pending reforms and will be reflected in subsequent updates.

These monitoring updates are not a substitute for the European Commission’s formal assessment role.

Članak Serbia – Reform Agenda Update – 2nd Semester 2025 se pojavljuje prvo na European Policy Centre.

Članak Serbia and the European Union: Geopolitics and EU Values – in Tension or in Tandem? se pojavljuje prvo na European Policy Centre.

Članak Western Balkan PAR Monitor: PUBLIC FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT 2024/2025 se pojavljuje prvo na European Policy Centre.

This policy paper examines how Russian, Chinese, and Turkish influence in the Western Balkans and the Eastern Trio may evolve by 2035, combining the InvigoratEU External Influence Index with a structured strategic foresight approach. The Index documents a sharp decline and high volatility in Russian influence since 2013, driven by war dynamics, sanctions, and geopolitical rupture, alongside a more incremental expansion of Chinese and Turkish influence through economic engagement, connectivity initiatives, and socially embedded networks.

Building on these empirical patterns, the paper identifies key drivers of external influence, drawing on political, economic, and societal dimensions, and reorganising them into higher-order strategic clusters that underpin a two-axis scenario framework. The first axis captures the strength of EU anchoring in candidate countries, understood as the interaction between EU credibility and domestic alignment, while the second concerns the nature of the international system, ranging from a rules-based order to coercive, “might-makes-right” dynamics. Crossing these axes yields three plausible scenarios for 2035: Great-Power Chessboard, characterised by intensified external leverage and weakened EU anchoring; Resilient Europe, where credible EU engagement, gradual integration, and domestic governance reforms reduce vulnerabilities; and Strategic Tug-of-War, a baseline trajectory marked by sustained hybrid competition and partial EU anchoring.

Across all scenarios, the analysis shows that external influence is not predetermined but contingent on governance capacity, societal resilience, and the credibility and delivery of EU engagement. While Russia’s trajectory remains uniquely volatile and shaped by critical uncertainties linked to the war in Ukraine, China’s and Turkey’s influence evolves more predictably within structural constraints set by EU policy choices and domestic conditions. The paper concludes that strengthening EU anchoring – through credible enlargement, gradual integration, and sustained support for governance and societal resilience – remains the most effective strategy to limit destabilising external influence and reinforce long-term stability in the EU’s enlargement countries.

Članak InvigoratEU Foreign Interference of China, Russia and Turkey in the EU Enlargement Countries until 2035: Three Scenarios and Policy Implications (D6.4) se pojavljuje prvo na European Policy Centre.