Crta: 1,200 Official Activities Before Vote Call

Crta presented the first report of its election observation mission for the 2026/2027 electoral cycle at a news conference in Belgrade on September 8, titled “Campaign Before the Call.” The report covers the period from March through early September, a stretch during which, according to the organization’s findings, the pre election campaign was already well underway even though elections have not yet been formally called. Srpske vesti previously reported, citing the same mission, that President Aleksandar Vucic appeared live on television 129 times in August; today’s report places that figure within a broader picture of state official activity recorded the same month.

According to data presented by Tamara Brankovic, Crta’s deputy director and mission coordinator, more than 1,200 field activities by senior state officials were recorded over the past four months, 400 of them in August alone. Nearly a fifth of all these activities, the report finds, show elements of public resource abuse, and every seventh activity carried out by the Serbian Progressive Party involved handing out material goods or promises, which Crta classifies as clientelism. Tied to this is a state disbursement of nearly one billion euros, whose rollout is being timed for the middle of the campaign.

The observation findings show that in a number of key areas, the state and the ruling party have become almost completely merged.

That assessment, published in the report on Crta’s website, comes from Rasa Nedeljkov, head of the observation mission. At the news conference, Nedeljkov summed up the moment in one sentence: “We are witnessing a campaign before the campaign.”

How are institutions responding to Crta’s complaints?

According to the report, they are not. The regulatory authority for electronic media has not issued a single decision in 22 months, and the Anti-Corruption Agency has failed to act on seven complaints filed by Crta. Since December 2023, the organization has filed 53 criminal complaints, 26 of them related to election irregularities, while courts have kept the cases stuck in the preliminary investigation phase for years. Of 54 recommendations from the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, only eight have been implemented, and no review of the voter register will be carried out before this election.

Within that framework, Nedeljkov warned, the election process itself is now underway without proper safeguards:

The election process will be entered, in practice and in part even formally, without the institutions responsible for protecting voters’ rights.

The report devotes particular attention to surveillance of the government’s political opponents. An independent forensic analysis, according to Crta’s findings, showed that 14 members of the student movement and the Green Left Front had phones infected with the Pegasus spyware.

Crta’s head of legal, Pavle Dimitrijevic, presented data at the conference on the unlawful collection of citizens’ personal information through Serbia’s postal service and on abuses tied to the Pension and Disability Insurance Fund. Brankovic, for her part, cited a case of threats to strip voters of social assistance, pointing to an example from Indjija, where, she said, employees of the local Center for Social Work directly pressured benefit recipients, telling them their assistance would be cut if they did not support the ruling party. The observed period also saw 85 politically motivated physical or verbal confrontations.

What does the monitoring of state broadcaster RTS show?

Here the sources used to put together this story diverge on exact figures, though they agree on direction. On its website, Crta states that the ruling majority received 96 percent of the political airtime on RTS’s Dnevnik 2 newscast, while N1 and Nova.rs, which carried the news conference itself, cited a figure showing the ruling majority got 98 percent of that airtime in August, with the opposition getting two percent. On one point there is no disagreement: Vucic alone took up half of the total airtime.

There is also a discrepancy over the scale of positive coverage of the president. Crta’s website states that positive coverage of Vucic was 11 times longer than during the 2022 campaign. According to what N1 and Nova.rs reported from the conference, citing Brankovic, the total airtime Vucic received on Dnevnik 2 was almost four times greater than in 2022, while his positive portrayal increased threefold, meaning these are two different measurements, not the same figure relayed two different ways.

Asked by reporters about pressure in the public and private sectors, Nedeljkov said everyone who does business with the state is being forced to help gather so called safe votes, and said this amounts to a series of potential criminal offenses in which, he said, employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are also involved.

Despite all this, Nedeljkov called on citizens to take part in monitoring election day itself:

They are trying to strip us of the right that belongs to us as citizens, the right to be objective and responsible observers. We will resist these attacks. Our goal is to gather as many facts as possible, especially on election day itself, showing whether citizens’ votes can be counted as legal and legitimate. It is not our responsibility that the data we collect does not suit the interests of the ruling parties.

Crta announced that on voting day it will deploy observers across a random, representative sample of 500 polling stations, and that around 2,500 citizens will be engaged across all phases of the election process. Under the latest announcements, early parliamentary elections are expected to be held on October 25, after the Government of Serbia adopted a proposal to dissolve the National Assembly and sent it to the President of Serbia, who has 72 hours to dissolve parliament and formally call the election.