163 amendments, five recommendations: arithmetic that does not add up

An old colleague who spent twelve years at the Republic Electoral Commission, today a pensioner in Topcidersko Brdo, told me recently over coffee that he had learned one rule: if a session of the Commission lasts less than three hours, it means everything around the election has already been agreed before the session. If it lasts more than eight, it means no one knows what they are doing. The worst, he added, are sessions that last exactly five hours, “because that means we will get a law that looks like a law, but is not”.

In recent days we have received precisely such a law. The National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia adopted on 21 May a package of amendments to the electoral laws, after a debate on 163 amendments tabled to four laws: on the election of the President of the Republic, on the election of MPs, on local elections, and on the Constitutional Court. The bill was tabled by Miroslav Petrasinovic of SNS, who in his explanatory note stated that the proposal was in line with ODIHR mission recommendations. The opposition was not in the chamber at the moment of adoption. Five out of twenty-five ODIHR recommendations were adopted.

I think about the numbers. Five out of twenty-five is twenty per cent. That is not a statistical coincidence. It is a neatly calibrated figure, large enough to face Brussels with the claim that “the recommendations have been partially adopted”, small enough that none of the serious problems of the electoral process (functionary campaigning, pressure on voters, media control, the “Bulgarian train”, pressure on members of polling boards) has even been touched. The job of an electoral reformer in Serbia, if that occupation exists at all, is an art in which calibration is called legislation.

What does this mean sociologically. The political scientist Dusan Spasojevic from the Centre for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA) has shown in several of his analyses, among them the study “The State of the Electoral System in Serbia” (CRTA, 2024), that since 2008 the Serbian electoral system has been developing systematically in the direction of a controlled outcome. It is not always rigged, it is not always pressured, but it is always decided that a problem that could be resolved by legal means should remain at the level of political control. The five recommendations now adopted are a typical example: technical rules on voter registration, formalities around candidate lists, transparency of campaign financing in ways that do not touch structure. The twenty recommendations that were not, that is what remains.

Now I must bring in a counter-argument, because a commentary without one is propaganda, not commentary. There is a reading according to which any recommendation adopted, however small, is a step forward. By that logic, five out of twenty-five is better than zero out of twenty-five, which was the norm in previous convocations. There is also the argument that the Assembly cannot adopt everything in one move, because more serious reforms would require constitutional changes (for example, the status of the Republic Electoral Commission as a permanent and independent body). In principle one can agree with both. In practice, the problem is different: when the authorities choose which recommendations to adopt, in the same gesture they choose which to leave out. Omitting 20 things is a political act as strong as adopting 5.

I kept thinking, all the way through writing this, of that sentence by Pierre Bourdieu in “Politics” (a collection of essays, 2002): “The field of power is described simultaneously by what enters the law and by what is cast out of it.” In Serbia in 2026, what has been cast out of the law is seriousness. A reform of the electoral system without functionary campaigning, without control over the public service in the campaign period, and without pressure on polling boards, is not a reform of the electoral system. It is a reform of the facade.

The other side, too, does not look self-assured. The opposition, which left the chamber at the moment of adoption, did not offer an alternative package of amendments that was coherent. Lazovic of the Green-Left Front rightly mentioned “pressure on polling boards, the Bulgarian train, media control”, but that is not enough for a counter-proposal. For decades the opposition in Serbia has chosen to walk out of the chamber rather than to engage in legislative business work. The reasons are understandable (minority MPs really have no procedural route to alter a majority law), but walking out is also a communicative message, and the message is “we do not have a proposal we would defend to the end”. Press releases are cheap, amendments are expensive.

I return to my colleague from the Electoral Commission, over coffee in Topcidersko Brdo. After I remarked that this was a “facade law”, he said something that stopped me: “It is not a facade, it is just as much law as is needed.” He meant it as a defence, but it is at the same time the most precise accusation. A law that is exactly as much law as is needed, no more and no less, is not a law in the sense of a regulation that binds everyone equally. It is an instrument. An instrument knows the difference between the one who holds it and the one to whom it is applied.

After the autumn elections, which the president has announced for some time between September and November 2026, this history will return. Brussels will say the recommendations have been “partly adopted”, the domestic opposition will say the elections were “unfair but not illegitimate”, the authorities will say “the rule of law functioned”. All three sentences can be true at once, and that is precisely the problem of a public sphere that has learned to speak about elections in terms that do not add up. The arithmetic of five out of twenty-five is not arithmetic. It is a narrative. And a narrative has an author.

There remains, at the end, a question to which the domestic media sphere rarely returns. What does the voter do, finding themselves in a system in which each electoral cycle is technically more correct than the previous one, while the political consequences of those elections remain the same? The one who mourns the structure does not go to the polling station. The one who believes that voting is worth something does. From this follows a paradox also described by colleagues at CRTA: the electoral apparatus gradually narrows to those who do not notice the problem, while those who notice it exit the system. An electoral law reform truly deserving the name would have to bring back this second group first, not by guaranteeing them victory, but by giving them a reason to vote. The five recommendations adopted, unfortunately, do not contain that reason.