Vucic Meets Kopman on Rule of Law and Elections

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic met on Thursday morning in Belgrade with Gert Jan Koopman, director of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Enlargement, in a conversation that came just before the session of the Operational Team for Serbia’s EU accession, which the president then chaired. The meeting focused on the rule of law and on meeting the interim benchmarks in accession chapters 23 and 24, areas Brussels has for years flagged as the hardest for Serbia.

This is the first substantive talk on the country’s European path since Vucic announced his resignation and called elections, which gives the exchange a weight that routine visits usually lack. According to the agenda, the two sides addressed the adoption of laws aligned with the recommendations of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, specifically its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), to improve the electoral process, as well as the election of a new Council of the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Media (REM).

The Operational Team session also took up the alignment of judicial laws with the recommendations of the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe body responsible for constitutional and legal questions. Attention turned, too, to the pace of the Reform Agenda under the Growth Plan for the Western Balkans, the instrument through which the Union conditions disbursements on reform progress. The leadership consistently presents the meeting as proof that Serbia remains committed to membership and continues working on its obligations despite domestic political uncertainty.

Do the reforms match the announcements?

The picture offered by civil society is markedly more cautious. Groups that monitor electoral conditions say that of dozens of ODIHR recommendations, not a single one has so far been adopted, that the election of a new REM Council has not been completed, and that the voter-roll review the opposition has demanded for years has not been carried out. By that assessment, the discussion of electoral conditions is taking place in the same spot it occupied months ago, even as the calendar moves toward a fresh vote.

The difference in tone is not merely rhetorical. For Brussels, chapters 23 and 24 are the mechanism by which it measures a candidate’s seriousness, and their interim benchmarks are not closed by statements of commitment but by laws adopted and applied. When the official side stresses intent while independent groups measure output, the gap between those two pictures becomes the heart of the question of how far the European path has really moved.

Why the timing matters

The resignation and the election call shift this conversation from the technical to the political plane. Electoral conditions that have been cited for years as unfinished business now become the yardstick against which the vote itself will be judged. If the REM Council is not chosen through a clear procedure and the electoral laws remain out of step with ODIHR recommendations, the coming campaign will run under rules Brussels already considers problematic.

For the Union, which ties money to reforms through the Growth Plan, this is a test of whether the Operational Team’s promises are followed by deeds. For citizens at home the question is more concrete: will the next election be held under conditions long flagged as unfair, or will at least some of the recommendations be met before the campaign begins?

On paper, commitment changes little from year to year. The difference will show in whether, this time, even one of the laws Brussels and ODIHR are seeking is adopted between the Koopman meeting and the first day of the campaign. Do you think electoral conditions will change before the vote is called, or does another cycle with the same objections lie ahead?