A Captured Field, an Open Contest: Serbia’s Upcoming Elections

A diagonal split image in duotone. On the left, an aerial view of Serbia’s National Assembly in Belgrade in grey; on the right, in red, a nighttime crowd at Slavija Square holding up phone lights.

Serbia goes to the polls on October 25 in an early parliamentary election, called after nearly two years of sustained protest. A presidential election will follow by the end of December, after President Vučić resigned in September to run for prime minister. A list emerging from the student movement leads in independent polling, and most opposition parties have stepped back to support it. It will contest seats against a party that has, over the past decade, consolidated control over broadcast media, the security apparatus, electoral administration, the public sector and the regulatory bodies.

The conditions are heavily uneven. National broadcasters and the tabloid press are aligned with the ruling party, while the regulatory bodies that might act as a corrective to this have repeatedly declined to act. Public funds, public employment and public contracts are used as leverage on voters. Questions about the accuracy of the voter register remain unresolved from previous cycles. International observers have issued the same recommendations election after election, and they have gone largely unimplemented. Recent local elections were marked by intimidation, and in some places by open violence at polling stations. The last major group of media not aligned with the government has changed hands to investment vehicles that have bought critical outlets elsewhere, only to quietly end their criticism.

Despite this, the outcome is not settled, and the election is worth watching closely. This panel brings together Serbian civil society organizations working on election observation and investigative journalism, along with a political sociologist who has written on Serbia’s captured institutions, its elections, and social movements. Nine days before the parliamentary vote, it asks what conditions are like on the ground and what is at stake.

This event is co-sponsored by the Democracy Action Lab at CDDRL and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

SPEAKERS

Raša Nedeljkov

Program Director, CRTA (Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability), Belgrade

Raša Nedeljkov is the Program Director of CRTA (Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability), an independent, non-partisan civil society organization that monitors electoral processes and the rule of law in Serbia. Since 2016, Nedeljkov has led CRTA’s election observation mission, coordinating its teams in monitoring campaigns and voting in presidential, parliamentary, city, and local elections, including this year’s parliamentary election. He has extensive knowledge of the media environment in the country, as well as of citizens’ perceptions, attitudes and habits in consuming information and media outputs. He has presented CRTA’s findings to the EU Affairs and the Culture and Media committees of the German Bundestag, the European Economic and Social Committee in Brussels, and gave the keynote address at International Democracy Day Brussels in 2025. CRTA recently conducted a large survey in collaboration with CDDRL's Democracy Action Lab.

Gazela Pudar Draško

Director and Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade

Gazela Pudar Draško is a political sociologist serving as Senior Research Fellow and Director at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, which is widely recognized for its commitment to engaged scholarship. Her work focuses on deliberative democracy and participatory politics, and she studies how institutions — universities, parties, public administration — remain oriented toward the common good against political capture. Her research on Serbia’s student plenums — faculty-level direct assemblies through which the student protest movement makes decisions — suggests that in a hybrid regime renewal is more likely to come from outside pressure, forced by mobilized citizens, than to be facilitated from within. Pudar Draško has also written on Serbian elections and is co-editing, with Florian Bieber and Vujo Ilić, a volume on the 2024–25 protests. In 2026–27 she is a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.

Dragana Žarković Obradović

Director, BIRN Serbia (Balkan Investigative Reporting Network)

Dragana Žarković Obradović is the Director of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) in Serbia. BIRN is a regional network of local non-governmental organizations and the publisher of Balkan Insight. With more than two decades of experience in journalism, media development, and project management, she leads a team of investigative journalists and media experts dedicated to strengthening independent journalism. Under her leadership, BIRN Serbia has earned some of the most prestigious national and international awards. Žarković Obradović is also the founding manager of BIRN’s Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence. In 2025, Amnesty International confirmed that two BIRN journalists had been targeted with Pegasus spyware, and BIRN Serbia has faced strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) aimed at silencing its reporting.

Francis Fukuyama

Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy

Moderator

Full Bio

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir was published in September 2026.