Brnabic sets no-confidence vote for Wednesday night
The extraordinary session resumed mid-morning with 125 MPs signed in. Parliament speaker Ana Brnabic says the chamber will vote the same day, even if the sitting runs until 11 p.m.
- The no-confidence vote on Djuro Macut's government is set for Wednesday, July 29.
- Ana Brnabic said the sitting will not be adjourned even if it runs until 11 p.m.
- 125 MPs were signed in on day three, the prime minister and his ministers among them.
- Electing a new government takes 126 MPs, and the ruling majority insists the numbers are not there.
Serbia’s National Assembly entered a third day of debate on no confidence in the government of Djuro Macut on Wednesday, July 29, and for the first time the debate has an announced finish line. Speaking on Pink television before the sitting resumed, parliament speaker Ana Brnabic said the chamber would vote on the opposition motion the same day and that she would not adjourn even if the session ran until 11 p.m.
Proceedings restarted mid-morning, around 10.30. A total of 125 MPs were signed in, including Prime Minister Djuro Macut and members of his cabinet. The first two days ended without a vote.
Five months from motion to ballot
The motion was filed by 62 opposition MPs on February 13, 2026, over the General Staff affair. Brnabic scheduled the session only for April 15, more than two months later. No vote followed then either, because MPs from the ruling majority repeatedly failed to produce a quorum and the sitting kept slipping.
After the delays, Brnabic argued the opposition did not have enough MPs even for its own motion. The answer came from the government benches: 109 MPs from the Aleksandar Vucic - Serbia Must Not Stop group added their signatures. The debate on the cabinet’s survival was therefore brought into the chamber by the very majority that keeps that cabinet in office.
Why does the ruling majority say the government is safe?
The reason is arithmetic. Removing the government and electing a new one requires 126 MPs, and no such coalition exists in this convocation, not even on paper. Milenko Jovanov, who heads the Aleksandar Vucic - Serbia Must Not Stop caucus, told the weekly Vreme that a ruling majority does not vote against its own government: “That has never happened and it is not happening.”
The opposition case
Pavle Grbovic, leader of the Movement of Free Citizens, challenged the cabinet’s basic capacity to run the country.
The government of Djuro Macut is not a government because it does not govern this country, and Djuro Macut governs it even less. This is the most pointless government we have had for as long as I can remember, and that is no small thing, because before it we had three governments led by Ana Brnabic. This government has neither the knowledge nor the resources nor the personnel to deal with the key problems Serbia faces today
Grbovic also told the prime minister he had failed as a professor, having stayed silent over the attempt to dismantle the University of Belgrade, and that he said nothing about his own minister’s remark on ethnic cleansing. Radomir Lazovic of the Green-Left Front went back to Macut’s assessment of the economy.
Yesterday Prime Minister Djuro Macut said without shame that Serbia is a “tiger”. Perhaps it is, if you measure it by the living standard of Sinisa Mali or Ana Brnabic. If you measure the standard of an ordinary citizen, only the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania and North Macedonia live worse than we do. You are selling us Expo as some kind of “step into the future”, when it is in fact a screen for funnelling public money into the private pockets of people close to the Serbian Progressive Party
Macut rejected the criticism and said that for 15 months he has worked every day from 6.15 in the morning until midnight. Finance Minister and First Deputy Prime Minister Sinisa Mali called opposition MP Miroslav Aleksic a liar during the debate. Day two was dominated by an exchange over the case in Mrcajevci and by a remark on ethnic cleansing in Kosovo made by Minister Snezana Paunovic.
One exchange strayed well beyond confidence in the cabinet. Green-Left Front MP Dobrica Veselinovic said in the chamber that his party recognises the independence of Kosovo, to which Brnabic replied that this is not Serbia’s official position.
Until the extraordinary session is formally closed, early parliamentary elections cannot be called. If the vote is held by 11 p.m., that procedural window shuts on Wednesday too, leaving the date of the elections as the only open question after five months of argument over confidence in the government.
