BIRODI: ODIHR report omits Vucic's campaign role

The Bureau for Social Research (BIRODI) said on July 31, 2026 that the needs assessment report of the ODIHR mission records that President Aleksandar Vucic “continues to have a central role in the political life of the country”, yet never connects that finding to the first priority recommendation from 2024, the one calling for a clear separation between the state and political parties.

The complaint is not about what the report says. It is about what dropped out of it.

What BIRODI holds against the president

The statement lists three actions that, in BIRODI’s reading, should have been measured against that recommendation:

• Vucic took part in the campaigns for the 2025 and 2026 local elections while holding the office of president
• he lent his name to the electoral lists of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS)
• he spoke at campaign rallies where he was introduced as the president

BIRODI argues that this breaches Article 111 of the Serbian Constitution and Article 40 of the Law on the Prevention of Corruption. The constitutional provision it invokes states that the president of the republic expresses the state unity of Serbia, while Article 40 governs the ban on a public official promoting a political entity. Two separate questions sit behind that: how the office itself is read, and what the person holding it may do at a party event.

The sentence BIRODI pulls out of the report, that the president continues to hold a central role in political life, is not in itself a finding of wrongdoing. It records a situation. The objection is that the description of the situation and the recommendation meant to change it sit in the same document without touching, as two unrelated data points.

A recommendation that slipped off the priority list

The chronology carries the whole argument. The recommendation on separating party and state was written in 2024 and stood first among the priorities. Two local election cycles followed, in 2025 and 2026, and in both of them, according to BIRODI, the president appeared alongside party lists. When ODIHR returned to assess what the next vote would need, that recommendation, BIRODI says, was no longer on the priority list.

For a group that has monitored elections for years, this is not a filing detail. Priority recommendations are what domestic actors cite when they argue about electoral conditions, so removing an item from the top of that list changes the argument itself, whatever happened on the ground.

Why does it matter who met the mission?

BIRODI says it was not invited to the meetings with the ODIHR mission, where it could have presented the findings of its own monitoring. That is the second half of the complaint, and it explains the first: if the organisation tracking how officials behave during a campaign never reaches the mission, its findings cannot reach the document either.

Needs assessment missions work on short deadlines and rely on conversations with institutions, parties, media and civil society groups. The choice of who gets a meeting therefore feeds straight into what the report contains.

No response from the governing side

In the sources available at the time of publication, neither the government nor SNS had answered BIRODI’s claims. ODIHR had not responded either to the charge that its finding on the president’s role was left without a legal frame.

The next move belongs to the side that calls the elections. Once they are scheduled, the same questions come back: in what capacity officials appear at rallies, and whether the first recommendation from 2024 is still treated as settled.