CRTA address in Bundestag: Serbia, a democratic crisis with European implications

Honourable Members of the Committee, Ladies and Gentlemen, Thank you for the opportunity to address you today.

Serbia today stands at a decisive point in its modern history.

The country that once symbolised democratic transition in the Western Balkans has become a warning sign of how quickly institutions can erode.

 

From stagnation to duplicity

The V-Dem Institute, in its 2024 Democracy Report, classifies Serbia as an “electoral autocracy.” Freedom House calls it a hybrid regime. Transparency International shows that Serbia’s Corruption Perceptions Index has been falling for eight consecutive years. According to Reporters Without Borders, Serbia has fallen steadily in press freedom rankings and now stands around the 100th place globally,  comparable to countries struggling with entrenched media capture.

For more than a decade, the governing Serbian Progressive Party has merged the state with the party, as confirmed in the ODIHR report on the December 2023 elections. With captured media and weakened institutions, what once was presented as stability has hardened into a system of political control.

Officially, Serbia’s leadership insists that “our strategic choice is the European path.” Something I am sure you will hear from the Speaker Brnabić later today. In practice, it does the opposite. President Vučić has stood at military parades in Moscow and Beijing, praising the leadership of Russia and China while accusing Brussels of interference.
For international audiences, the message is reform; at home, it is accusation,  a narrative in which the West is the source of every Serbian problem.

President Vučić has repeatedly portrayed Serbia’s civic movement as a foreign plot,  and Germany has been placed at the centre of that narrative.
In July, on national television, he claimed that Serbia was facing a “colour revolution, paid for and organised from abroad,” questioning how many workshops Deutsche Welle had held in Serbia in recent months.
Shortly afterwards, in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he suggested that student protest leaders had been supported through German state scholarships, adding that he had “no evidence,” only “suspicions.” These and similar statements serve to portray Germany and the European Union as the cause of Serbia’s unrest, and to discredit citizens who still see their country’s future in Europe.

 

The domestic picture

Over the past year, the public mood in Serbia has changed profoundly. Most citizens now believe the country is moving in the wrong direction. Corruption has become the defining problem of daily life, the single word that explains how power is gained, used, and protected.

The protests that began last November have not faded; they have become a moral referendum on Serbia’s future. Almost six in ten citizens say they support the demonstrations, and nearly two-thirds believe that early elections are the only democratic way out of the crisis,  the only way to bring politics back into institutions instead of streets.

Yet Serbia is divided between two completely different worlds. Among supporters of the ruling party, barely five percent see EU membership as a way to protect Serbia’s interests, while more than a third prefer alignment with Russia and China. On the other side are the students and citizens who fill the squares, among them, over forty percent want Serbia firmly anchored in the European Union.

This divide is not natural; it has been manufactured. It is the result of a decade of government propaganda that normalised anti-European rhetoric and glorified authoritarian partners.

CRTA’s latest media monitoring shows how. In the first half of 2025, the EU faced by far the most negative coverage of any international actor in Serbian media. Of all television reports mentioning the EU, 77 percent were negative. By contrast, Russia was portrayed positively in roughly three quarters of all mentions, and China in more than nine out of ten. China and Russia are routinely depicted as Serbia’s “true friends,” while the EU and its member states are presented as sources of pressure, division, or threat. In such an environment, anti-European sentiment does not arise naturally,  it is the product of systematic, state-controlled propaganda.

 

Regional and external consequences

Serbia’s internal decline has become a regional and European concern. The “Serbian World” narrative echoes the Kremlin’s language of spheres of influence. The European Parliament has already identified Serbia as a destabilising actor, spreading disinformation across the Western Balkans.

There are credible reports that individuals trained in Serbia were arrested in Moldova shortly before that country’s elections,  suspected of preparing unrest to discredit pro-European forces. This is part of a recognisable pattern: training, disinformation, hybrid operations, and deniability.

At the same time, reports by investigative journalists from KRIK and Važne priče revealed that 204 Russian nationals,  including figures linked to the FSB, war profiteers from Ukraine, and oligarchs under EU sanctions,  were granted Serbian citizenship by special decree, each described as being “in the national interest.” These decisions allow sanctioned individuals to bypass EU restrictions, turning Serbia into a gateway for evading European sanctions.

Regionally, the Banjska attack of 2023,  in which a heavily armed group killed a Kosovo police officer,  remains unresolved. Figures connected to that incident now appear as SNS enforcers, visible in the party camp in front of the Presidency and Parliament, and in sports arenas, where they silence chants against the government.

This combination,  authoritarian politics, regional interference, and cooperation with convicted felons and war criminals,  poses risks not only for Serbia’s democracy but for Europe’s security architecture.

 

Europe’s responsibility

Serbia’s situation is more than a national crisis; it is a test for the European project. It asks whether enlargement remains a process of democratic transformation, or has become an exercise in short-term pragmatism.

For too long, European institutions viewed Aleksandar Vučić as a stabilising partner. Today, it is clear that the citizens of Serbia, students, journalists, civic organisations,  are the true carriers of European values. They still believe in Europe, even when their government undermines it.

When young people in Belgrade march for accountability, they are not rejecting Europe; they are asking Europe to stand by its own principles. Some of them quite literally ran and cycled toward those principles,  from Belgrade to Brussels, from Belgrade to Strasbourg, not as a demand for charity, but as a reminder of shared values. Germany, as a cornerstone of the European Union and a long-time advocate of enlargement based on the rule of law, has a special responsibility to keep that standard intact.

 

Restoring democratic confidence

Serbia is not an ordinary candidate country. It is a fragile democracy at a point of fracture, where the independence of institutions and the media is gravely weakened. Hollowed-out institutions now serve political interests rather than the public good. In such an environment, the potential for further escalation of violence is real,  not because citizens are radicalised, but because the mechanisms meant to ensure justice and accountability no longer function.

Europe needs consistency,  and the confidence that defending democracy is never interference. Support for Serbia’s citizens is not interference; it is a shared obligation to uphold the principles that bind the Union together.

 

Closing reflection

Democracy rarely collapses in a single moment. It weakens when truth yields to propaganda, when fear replaces trust, and when convenience replaces accountability. That is what has happened in Serbia,  and that is why Serbia matters to Europe.

No one should fear elections. Elections are not a risk; they are the only legitimate path to renewal,  the way civic energy moves from the streets into the political arena, where public confidence can be restored and democratic life can begin again.

If Serbia’s partners, including Germany, help ensure that this process is free, fair, and transparent, they will strengthen not only Serbia’s renewal but also the credibility of the European Union itself.

Democracy is repaired by citizens who vote, by institutions that protect them, and by partners who stand beside them. That is our common task, in Belgrade, in Berlin, and across Europe.