SRCE Challenges Kragujevac Council Mandate Extension

The Constitutional Court received a new initiative from Kragujevac on September 9. The Srbija Centra City Committee is asking the court to strike down a provision that lets local community council members stay in office after their four-year mandate expires, rather than requiring the city to call elections for a new council. This is the first report on the dispute to reach our newsroom.

At issue is Article 2 of the Decision Amending the Decision on Local Self-Government, published in the Official Gazette of the City of Kragujevac, No. 16 of 2026. The disputed provision states that council members whose mandate has expired continue working and carry out current, urgent tasks within the council’s jurisdiction until a new council is constituted under the rules of that same decision.

What SRCE Is Asking the Constitutional Court to Do

The petitioners argue that the provision directly conflicts with two other rules: Article 74 of the Law on Local Self-Government and Article 89 of the Statute of the City of Kragujevac. Both, according to the initiative, set the mandate of local community council members at four years, with no provision for an automatic extension until a new council is formed.

SRCE is asking the Constitutional Court to void the provision and order elections for council members. In the statement accompanying the initiative, the Srbija Centra City Committee says a large number of local community councils in Kragujevac have had expired mandates for a long time, meaning that if the provision is struck down, it would raise the question of a new election cycle in those communities.

In that same statement, the City Committee said the following about the city’s ruling party:

“The Serbian Progressive Party’s authorities in Kragujevac are afraid to hold elections for members of the local community councils.”

The statement, issued by the Srbija Centra City Committee in Kragujevac, frames the ruling party’s reluctance to hold elections as the reason behind the disputed rule.

The statement goes on to offer an explanation for why the city adopted the amendment in the first place: to cover the work of a large number of local community councils whose mandates had long since expired, the Kragujevac City Assembly, according to the petitioners, passed the very decision they are now challenging as unlawful.

At its core, the dispute is a constitutional question boiled down to a single sentence. The Law on Local Self-Government and the Statute of the City of Kragujevac cap a local community council’s mandate at four years, without a word about any extension. The city’s decision adds an exception that keeps council members in office until elections for a new council are organized. Whether that is a technical fix for the period before a new council is seated, as the city government explains it in the decision itself, or a way around the legal deadline, as the Srbija Centra City Committee claims, is now a question for the Constitutional Court to answer.

If the court accepts the initiative, the next step would be calling elections for the local community councils whose mandates have expired. That would add another round of voting to Kragujevac’s electoral calendar, one that rarely draws much attention from the wider public but that party leadership in local government tends to watch closely, since local community councils help build part of the field network for the next election cycle.

What Happens Next

There is no prescribed deadline for the Constitutional Court to rule on initiatives of this kind, so it remains unclear when the court might decide on the provision’s legality. Until then, local community council members whose mandates have expired remain in office under the disputed decision and continue handling current business.

Neither the Kragujevac City Assembly nor the city government has responded to the claims in the initiative so far. The Serbian Progressive Party’s City Committee in Kragujevac has also not reacted to the accusation that the decision was adopted to avoid holding elections, as of this writing.

News of the initiative was reported the same day by Beta, InfoKG, Glas Sumadije, Radio Sto Plus and Danas, alongside our own newsroom, a sign that the dispute over council mandates in Kragujevac’s local communities is being read as more than a purely local administrative matter. Kragujevac is thus becoming another local government where the question of expired mandates in local communities is being settled before the Constitutional Court rather than at the ballot box.