One Point Seven Million Voters No One Writes About

On the number 24 bus, last Tuesday at about eleven in the morning, on the stretch between Slavija and Vozdovac, I counted the passengers by profile. There were twenty-eight of us.

Of those twenty-eight, seventeen were over sixty, identifiable by the pensioner card they tapped on entry. Five were middle-aged, mostly with Maxi shopping bags or a gym bag. Three were teenagers with headphones. The remaining three were students.

Seventeen out of twenty-eight, which is 61 percent of the bus, were pensioners on a weekday at work hours. This is not unusual for Belgrade public transport in 2026. It is the rule.

A majority that does not count in the media

I bring this figure up at the start because its sociological weight is greater than the one usually given in political analyses. There, the line is: “Pensioners are a large voting bloc.” But the numbers that show how large rarely follow.

According to the Pension and Disability Insurance Fund of the Republic, in the first quarter of 2026 Serbia has 1,697,823 beneficiaries of old-age, disability and survivor pensions. According to the Statistical Office of the Republic for the same period, the number of people in permanent employment (excluding undeclared work and various forms of contract engagement) stands at 1,512,000.

In other words, Serbia has more pensioners than workers on permanent contracts. Administratively, this bloc is larger than the sum of all employees in trade, construction, transport and agriculture combined.

The sociology of ageing, not just demography

I pivot to the sociology of ageing, because this is where a serious argument can be built. In his book “Why Survive” (Harper, 1975), American gerontologist Robert Butler, the 1976 Pulitzer Prize winner, developed the concept he called ageism, the segregationist stance toward the old in all modern societies.

Butler’s thesis runs as follows:

In societies in which working capacity is the main criterion of value, those outside that capacity are treated as a cost, not a resource. Politics uses them as electoral core, but does not include them in shaping policy.

The media treat them as audience, not as a source of discourse. Public institutions oblige them to adapt to institutional pace, not the other way around. Butler wrote this for American society in 1975. In Serbia 2026, he describes the condition with a precision that should jolt the sociologist.

€313 a month, below the minimum

Some more figures. The average old-age pension in Serbia in May 2026 stands at 36,700 dinars, around €313 a month. The minimum pension is 22,146 dinars (€188). The maximum pension in the solidarity system is capped at 154,030 dinars (€1,315).

For comparison, the cost-of-living basket for a single-person household in Belgrade, according to a Forum for Accountability study, runs to 48,500 dinars a month. That is the floor of subsistence (medicines, food, utilities, transport).

Statistically, then, the average Serbian pensioner lives below the floor of subsistence. The minimum pension covers less than half of it. This is not an economic problem. It is a sociological collapse. An entire category of 1.7 million people is institutionally placed in material insecurity, but is treated in politics as the “contented voter.”

Why politics loves pensioners

Pensioners in Serbia are a politically useful bloc for three reasons.

• Structural: they vote at higher rates than the population average (around 78 percent turnout, per a 2024 CESID study, against 62 percent across the whole electorate)
• Media: they primarily watch public broadcasting and the highest-reach private channels (Pink, Happy, Prva), which makes them a soft target for ruling-party communication
• Economic: they are one of the few groups in direct material interaction with the state, through the pension, so even a small intervention carries emotional weight beyond its economic value

Politics that uses pensioners as the core voting reservoir, given these three components, plays out roughly like this. Before an election, an extraordinary payment of 10,000 to 20,000 dinars (€85 to €170) is announced. It is accompanied by a media campaign that frames it as “the state’s care” for the most vulnerable. The payment goes out before election day.

Clientelism in its purest form

After the election, the next payment is announced for the next election. In between, pensions are not raised faster than inflation. Pensioners are fed lump sums that are small in real terms but emotionally enough to sustain loyalty.

This is a clientelist structure in its purest form. In Serbian sociology, Mladen Lazic, in “Waiting for Capitalism” (Sluzbeni glasnik, 2011), described it as “the redistribution of small favours in place of a change in structure.”

A counter-argument. There is a reading, often heard from circles close to power, according to which the state’s continuous care for pensioners proves the system works. Regular payments, periodic raises, additional aid, all supposedly show that the state does not forget the most vulnerable.

The argument carries a partial truth. The state does pay out. But the question is sociological, not accounting. The difference between the state keeping pensioners at the level of meagre subsistence and the state guaranteeing pensioners a dignified life after working age is the difference between two entirely different social contracts. The first is clientelist (the pensioner as a voter in economic dependence). The second is solidarist (the pensioner as a citizen with the right to dignified ageing). Serbian politics in 2026 runs on the first model. The second has never been seriously debated in public.

The depoliticisation of the mass population

One more thing should be said. Pensioners in Serbia 2026 are not passive recipients. Paradoxically, they are one of the few civic blocs with organisational infrastructure (the Association of Pensioners of Serbia, regional branches, local clubs, military and police pensioner unions).

But that infrastructure is itself woven into the clientelist network of power, with state subsidies, grants and space in public institutions. That makes it a captive of its own position.

Hannah Arendt, in the essay “On Politics” from “Reflections on Modernity” (1958), warned of a phenomenon she called the “depoliticisation of the mass population,” the process by which large groups of people are treated as “population” (an object of administration) rather than “the public” (a subject of politics). Pensioners in Serbia 2026 live in exactly that status. They exist, they are counted, they vote, but they are not heard as voice. They function only as a number in the electoral commissions’ spreadsheets.

The question no one asked

I return to the number 24 bus. As we crossed the centre of Vozdovac, a woman of about seventy-eight sat next to me. She was tired. I asked her: “Is this bus reliable for you?”

She replied: “Well, sir, this is the only bus I can afford. With the pensioner card I travel for free. Bolt I can’t manage, a taxi from Vozdovac to Auto-komanda is two hundred dinars, I don’t have that.”

When we got off at the same stop, she said, almost in the last row:

Thank you for asking. No one has asked me in a long time whether this is good for me.

I carry that sentence into the close of this essay. The question that remains, and which is not rhetorical, is roughly this.

If one million seven hundred thousand people in our society are not asked “is this good for you,” because politics treats them as voters rather than citizens, and the media as audience rather than subjects, how many more such invisible majorities do we need before our society loses its definition. And what are we doing with our social contract when the majority is no longer a subject but a kind of background.