Speaker cuts off MP who called Kosovo a neighbour
On the third day of the no-confidence debate, the Speaker of the National Assembly distanced the chamber from an opposition MP who spoke of Kosovo as a neighbouring country.
Speaker of the National Assembly Ana Brnabic stopped Green-Left Front MP Dobrica Veselinovic in the middle of his address and distanced the chamber from his wording after he referred to Kosovo as a neighbour. The exchange took place on July 29, 2026, the third day of the extraordinary session on the no-confidence motion against the government.
Veselinovic used the phrase “with our neighbours, with Kosovo”. The Speaker interrupted him and stated that this is not the position of the institution she chairs.
“As Speaker of the Assembly I have to distance myself, because you said, and I quote, with our neighbours, with Kosovo, that for our Assembly those are not our neighbours, Kosovo and Metohija is an integral part of Serbia, it is an autonomous province. Those are not our neighbours, that is not our position, that is your position.”
MPs from the ruling coalition responded with applause. Veselinovic was speaking as part of a debate in which the opposition is seeking to bring down the government, so a single sentence about terminology shifted the subject, for several minutes, from the survival of the cabinet to the status of the province.
Why the intervention came from the chair
Brnabic spoke in her capacity as Speaker, not on behalf of her parliamentary group. She said Kosovo and Metohija is an integral part of Serbia and an autonomous province rather than a neighbouring state, and that the opposite formulation was the personal position of the MP who used it.
The difference between those two registers is not a technicality. A presiding officer speaks as the institution, and any correction issued from that seat enters the record as the position of the house rather than as one more line in a political argument.
What happened a day earlier
This was not the first flashpoint of the same session. A day earlier, on July 28, Radomir Lazovic, an MP from the same group, called Kosovo a country of the region during his address, in a passage criticising Minister Snezana Paunovic.
Two speeches in two days, from the same benches, handed the governing majority a reason to turn a debate about confidence in the cabinet into a debate about how the opposition names the province. Instead of pressing its own charges against the government, the Green-Left Front now has a question of its own to answer.
Kosovo is the subject on which coalition and opposition lines break fastest in the Serbian parliament, which is why word choice there rarely passes without consequence. MPs who mention it in the context of regional cooperation are routinely corrected from the chair, and the clip of that correction tends to travel further than the speech that produced it.
The National Assembly has yet to vote on the no-confidence motion itself. Until it does, day three of the debate will be remembered for one sentence about the map rather than for anything said about the budget, appointments or ministerial accountability.
