Serbia's government survives no-confidence vote
Only 40 MPs backed the motion against Djuro Macut's cabinet after a three-day debate, although 62 opposition lawmakers had signed the request for it.
The motion of no confidence in the Serbian government failed in the National Assembly. The vote was held on the evening of July 29, after three days of debate, with 40 MPs in favour, 135 against and one abstention.
The request to hold the debate at all carried the signatures of 62 opposition MPs. In the end, 22 fewer lawmakers voted for the motion than had signed for it, and that gap was the first thing the speaker of parliament reached for the next morning.
From February 13 to the end of July
The motion was filed on February 13 of this year. The debate was scheduled only at the end of July, once the ruling coalition led by the Serbian Progressive Party agreed to put the session on the calendar. The same opposition request had been turned down twice before, so this was the first time the question of confidence in the government actually reached a vote.
The debate ran for three days, on July 27, 28 and 29, and closed on Wednesday evening. We covered the scheduled vote a day earlier, when all 62 signatures were still behind the request. The cabinet of Djuro Macut was elected on April 16, 2025, and this was the first time parliament weighed in on its survival.
What Macut and Brnabic said
Prime Minister Djuro Macut spoke to public broadcaster RTS on July 30. He summed up the three-day sitting in a single line:
One big session that showed the government has support
Macut added that on average around twenty MPs were in the chamber during the debate, and that the sitting produced both genuine democratic argument and language that should not have been used. The government, he said, carries on at the same pace.
Speaker of the National Assembly Ana Brnabic spoke in Cacak, at the opening of a glass viewing platform on Kablar. She likened the three days to a political reality show, and put the arithmetic this way:
What is unbelievable is that we had the signatures of 62 MPs to debate no confidence in the government, and 40 MPs voted for no confidence in the government
Brnabic did not name the lawmakers who signed the request but did not vote for the motion.
How many MPs actually stood behind the motion?
Serbia’s parliament has 250 seats. Forty MPs voted for no confidence and 135 voted against, meaning more than half of the full chamber backed the government staying in office. One MP abstained.
The number of signatures was never enough to bring the cabinet down on its own, since 62 names cannot unseat a government with an absolute majority behind it. The signature was a ticket to a debate, not to a change of government.
The cabinet now continues with the same line-up. What the three-day session leaves behind is one figure nobody explained from the rostrum, and it is not 135 but 22, the number of MPs who signed the request and then did not turn up in the column that voted for it.
