Serbia's Slow Strangulation: How Vučić Perfected Europe's Democratic Decay

Countries seeking European Union membership are supposed to become more democratic as they approach accession. Serbia is proving the opposite. Since Aleksandar Vučić's Serbian Progressive Party took power in 2012, the country has slid from "partly free" to the edge of authoritarianism while somehow remaining an EU candidate in good standing. This is, to put it mildly, a contradiction worth examining. It is also a template that other would-be autocrats are studying with keen interest.

The numbers

The decline is measurable and consistent. Freedom House's latest Nations in Transit report, published in April 2025, classified Serbia as a "transitional or hybrid regime" with a democracy score of 3.36 out of 7, down from 3.96 in 2015. The Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg ranks Serbia 97th globally in its liberal democracy index — below Botswana, below Mongolia, below Paraguay. The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index places Serbia at 63rd, in the "flawed democracy" category, though analysts there suggest this may be charitable.

What makes Serbia distinctive is not the descent but its velocity and direction. Hungary under Viktor Orbán required a constitutional supermajority to reshape the state; Vučić has achieved similar control without one. Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan needed a failed coup and subsequent emergency powers; Serbia's president has managed through incremental capture of institutions, each step too small to trigger serious alarm, each adding up to something rather alarming indeed.

A familiar playbook

The Serbian model relies on what political scientists call "competitive authoritarianism" — a system where elections occur but are so heavily tilted that genuine competition becomes impossible. Opposition parties exist and campaign; they simply cannot win. The mechanisms are sophisticated. Electoral rolls contain anomalies that the OSCE has flagged repeatedly: in the December 2023 elections, observer missions documented voter bussing, pressure on public-sector employees, and suspicious patterns in turnout that suggested ballot-stuffing in certain municipalities.

The ruling party's advantage compounds across domains. Control of the regulatory anti-corruption agency means investigations target opposition figures while government allies enjoy impunity. The prosecution service, nominally independent, has not brought a significant case against a senior ruling-party member since 2014. Judges who rule inconveniently find their careers stalling; those who accommodate power advance. The pattern is not unique to Serbia — it is, in fact, the standard authoritarian toolkit — but Belgrade's application has been notably efficient.

The student protests that erupted in November 2024, following a deadly railway station collapse that killed 15 people, offered a rare moment of genuine threat to the regime. Demonstrators accused the government of corruption in construction contracts and cover-ups in the investigation. For weeks, tens of thousands marched in Belgrade. The government's response was instructive: initial restraint, followed by a media campaign portraying protesters as foreign-funded destabilisers, followed by selective arrests of organisers. By March 2025, the protests had fragmented. The regime had absorbed the blow.

The European Union's curious silence

Serbia began accession negotiations in 2014. Eleven years later, it has provisionally closed exactly two of 35 negotiating chapters — the fewest of any candidate country at this stage. The EU's annual progress reports dutifully catalogue democratic deficits: problems with judicial independence, media freedom, rule of law. And then nothing happens. Serbia remains a candidate. New chapters occasionally open. The accession process continues its slow, meaningless crawl.

The explanation is geopolitical. Serbia is strategically located in the Western Balkans, a region the EU fears losing to Russian and Chinese influence. Vučić has played this masterfully, maintaining close ties with Moscow (Serbia has not joined EU sanctions on Russia over Ukraine) while accepting EU infrastructure funding and dangling the prospect of eventual alignment. Brussels, fearful of pushing Belgrade further east, has chosen engagement over conditionality. This has produced the worst of both worlds: no leverage over Serbia's democratic trajectory and no meaningful progress toward integration.

The mechanism

How does Vučić maintain control without the overt repression that characterises dictatorships? Three factors stand out. First, the regime is genuinely popular with a significant portion of the electorate. Economic growth, though unequally distributed, has been real: GDP per capita has risen from roughly $6,000 in 2012 to over $10,000 today. Stability after the chaos of the 1990s counts for something. Second, the opposition remains fragmented, its leaders discredited by past failures or co-opted by the ruling party's patronage networks. Third, and most importantly, the regime has mastered the art of selective repression — targeting enough opponents to create a chilling effect without crossing the threshold that would force Western reaction.

Investigative journalists from outlets like KRIK, BIRN, and CINS face harassment, surveillance, and occasionally violence — but not murder. Opposition politicians encounter tax investigations and building-code violations — but not imprisonment. NGOs operate under pressure — but have not been banned. The regime calibrates its authoritarianism precisely to the point where international observers can still, if they squint, call it a democracy.

What is to be done

The EU's current approach — endless process without meaningful conditionality — has failed. A more honest policy would acknowledge that Serbia under its current leadership is not progressing toward membership and should not pretend otherwise. This does not mean abandoning engagement. Trade, investment, and people-to-people ties can continue. What should end is the fiction that accession is imminent or that democratic reforms are occurring.

More specifically, the EU should impose genuine costs for democratic backsliding: suspending negotiating chapters when rule-of-law benchmarks are not met, conditioning infrastructure funding on judicial independence, and naming individuals responsible for electoral manipulation in public reporting. The bloc possesses these tools; it has simply chosen not to use them. Fear of losing Serbia to Russia is legitimate, but the current approach is losing Serbia anyway — to a domestic autocracy that sees no downside to its behaviour.

Supporting independent media and civil society directly — bypassing government channels — would help preserve the space for opposition that still exists. The United States, under previous administrations, played a useful role here; its current disengagement from European democracy promotion has been noticed in Belgrade.

The wider lesson

Serbia matters beyond its borders because it demonstrates how democratic erosion can proceed without dramatic rupture. There is no single moment when democracy dies — only a gradual accumulation of small surrenders, each defensible in isolation, each contributing to a system where power is no longer genuinely contested. Orbán in Hungary required constitutional change; Poland's Law and Justice party needed explicit court-packing. Vučić has shown that none of this is necessary. Control of media, selective enforcement of laws, and the patience to wait out protests can achieve the same result with less fuss.

The students who marched through Belgrade's streets this winter understood the stakes better than many Western policymakers. They carried signs reading "You have blood on your hands" and "This is not normal." They were right on both counts. Whether their understanding translates into political change, or whether Serbia continues its quiet strangulation of democratic norms, will depend in part on whether Europe decides that its values are worth defending — even when defending them is inconvenient. The evidence so far is not encouraging.