Serbia is heading back to the polls more than a year ahead of schedule. President Aleksandar Vučić has confirmed he will sign the decree dissolving the National Assembly and set the vote for 25 October, following the government’s 7 September proposal, made at Prime Minister Đuro Macut’s initiative. The government frames the decision as a democratic release valve after nearly two years of student-led protests, sparked by the November 2024 Novi Sad railway canopy collapse that killed sixteen people. Vučić’s critics read it differently, as a bid to consolidate power at a moment of maximum vulnerability, with his own Serbian Progressive Party having nominated him to run for prime minister.

The protests behind the government’s decision are themselves the most sustained challenge to the SNS since it took power in 2012. The last major rally, on 23 May, drew between 180,000 and 190,000 people by an independent monitor’s count, though police put the turnout at roughly 34,300, a gap illustrative of how contested public figures have become in Serbia; even on the lower count, it ranked among the largest demonstrations since the fall of Slobodan Milošević in 2000. A CRTA-Stanford Democracy Action Lab survey conducted the following month, the first to show the movement ahead, put a prospective Student List at 44.9 percent among decided voters against 35.7 percent for the SNS, though other polls around the same period showed the race far tighter, and the movement had yet to name candidates or publish a platform by the time the election was called, an uncertainty that could as easily blunt its advantage as convert it into seats. Vučić, constitutionally barred from a third presidential term, is positioning himself to return as prime minister if his party’s list prevails, a manoeuvre that would keep him at the centre of Serbian power regardless of which office he holds.

Whichever reading proves correct, the timing puts Brussels in an uncomfortable position. Serbia’s accession bid has been effectively stalled for years, and the government’s critics point to Vučić’s parallel courtship of Moscow and Beijing as one reason why.

The stall is not merely rhetorical. Serbia has opened 22 of the EU’s 35 negotiating chapters and provisionally closed two, but talks have not advanced since December 2021, a freeze Vučić himself has blamed on the war in Ukraine and Serbia’s refusal to sanction Russia. The most recent test came in July 2026, when eight member states blocked the opening of Cluster 3 on competitiveness and inclusive growth, even though the European Commission has maintained since 2021 that Serbia meets the technical benchmarks to proceed. That is itself a tell: the objecting ambassadors cited rule-of-law standards and Serbia’s foreign-policy alignment specifically, not the Commission’s own technical assessment, as their grounds for holding the cluster back. The Commission has applied financial pressure before: in April, Kos warned Belgrade it risked losing access to roughly €1.5 billion in EU funds over what she called broader democratic backsliding, a warning issued after monitors documented violence and irregularities in that month’s local elections, and one that has not translated into any public follow-through since.

That tension sharpened further in the days before the election announcement, when Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb commander convicted of genocide at Srebrenica, died on 27 August in the prison hospital where he was serving his life sentence. His burial in Belgrade on 7 September, days before the dissolution proposal, included an honour guard and a ceremonial volley, and Serbian Armed Forces personnel carried the coffin, even though Serbian legal experts remain divided on whether there was any legal basis for military honours given his conviction. The funeral service itself, held at Belgrade’s Church of St Luke, was led by Patriarch Porfirije, head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and drew Defence Minister Bratislav Gašić, Justice Minister Nenad Vujić, Culture Minister Nikola Selaković, and two further cabinet-level officials, alongside Bosnian Serb nationalist leader Milorad Dodik and Russia’s ambassador to Belgrade. Vučić himself stayed away from the service, sending his son Danilo in his place, a choice critics read as an attempt to acknowledge the funeral without bearing its political cost directly. EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos called the surrounding glorification “incompatible with the values on which the EU path is built” and cancelled a planned visit to Serbia in the days beforehand. An early election called under these conditions is exactly the kind of test that should tell Brussels something about whether its own merit-based enlargement language means anything in practice. The day after the burial, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Council President António Costa went further, calling the funeral images “shocking” and the presence of senior Serbian ministers “deeply regrettable.” Asked what consequences might follow, von der Leyen’s spokesperson said only that the Commission was “looking into it,” leaving the question open ahead of the bloc’s annual enlargement report, due in late October or early November. That leaves Brussels with a more awkward question than whether Serbia’s government meets the Union’s standards on its own: what weight, if any, it should give to pluralism inside the institutions it is judging.

A Parliament More Diverse Than The Accession Debate Admits

One detail tends to get lost in coverage of Serbia’s polarised politics: its National Assembly is more pluralistic in composition than the Vučić-versus-opposition framing suggests. Among the Assembly’s six Deputy Speakers sits Edin Đerlek, a Bosniak Muslim from Novi Pazar, elected to the post when the current legislature convened in March 2024, one indication that Serbia’s institutions accommodate a minority-faith figure in a senior leadership role, in a country where Serbian Orthodox Christianity remains overwhelmingly dominant.

The demographic weight behind that figure is not large. Muslims make up 4.2 percent of Serbia’s population under the 2022 census, and Bosniaks, concentrated in the Sandžak towns of Novi Pazar, Tutin, and Sjenica, account for roughly 2.3 percent nationally. A community that small producing a Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly is not proof of a systemic commitment to pluralism, but it is not nothing either.

That matters to the accession question because Brussels’ assessment of Serbia is not only about elections and foreign policy. It is also about whether political pluralism exists inside the institutions being judged, and a country that just buried a genocide convict amid disputed military honours is the same country whose Deputy Speaker chairs its outreach to the Gulf and has represented it in Beijing. Đerlek’s Sandžak background has translated into real diplomatic function: audiences with Saudi delegations, a chairmanship of Serbia’s Joint Commission with Kuwait, and outreach toward Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malaysia. That makes his appointment more than a symbolic exercise in representation, and it sits uncomfortably alongside a government whose foreign-policy alignment and rule-of-law record are the very grounds EU ambassadors cite for freezing Cluster 3.

The tension is the point. Serbia’s Assembly contains more institutional diversity than its accession file gets credit for, while the government leading that same institution is the one Brussels considers unready on the merits it actually enforces. That gap, real pluralism inside an institution Brussels will not advance, is a more useful test of the Commission’s merit-based enlargement language than anything in the campaign itself.

Serbia’s voters go to the polls on 25 October. What the European Union decides to ask about the country in the meantime, about its Mladić funeral, its stalled accession file, and its parliament’s own internal diversity, will say as much about the Commission’s seriousness as anything Belgrade does at the ballot box.