The EU's Serbia Report Is a Baseline for the New Majority, Not a Verdict

The European Commission's 2026 report on Serbia, published on Wednesday, describes a year of stalled negotiations and backsliding in public administration, freedom of expression and external trade. Supporters of the former government will say Brussels ignored the progress in technical alignment that the report itself acknowledges. Critics will say it confirms what protesters argued for two years. Both readings miss its practical value: this is the starting line against which the incoming majority will be measured.

Some fixes are cheap

Several findings point to changes that cost little and need no constitutional reform. The Commission asks for media laws to be applied as written, for an independent regulator, and for transparency of media ownership and state co-financing of media content. It asks senior officials to stop verbal attacks on journalists. A new government can stop such attacks the day it takes office, and can publish who receives public media money within weeks. Serbia also meets the benchmarks to open Cluster 3; a credible signal on the rule of law could unlock that step.

Some are hard, and should be said plainly

Other findings will test the Student List's coalition-building and its voters' patience. Foreign policy alignment, including EU sanctions on Russia, touches energy dependence, the future of NIS and deep public attitudes. Normalisation with Kosovo under the 2023 agreement has been politically toxic for every Serbian government. No new majority can deliver these in a hundred days, and it should not pretend otherwise. Saying clearly what it will and will not do on these files would itself be an improvement.

Fair to the past, demanding of the future

The outgoing authorities are entitled to point out that the report credits continued legislative alignment and that some EU positions, such as on Cluster 3, have been blocked for years by member states' politics as much as by Belgrade. But the report's central message is about institutions, not geopolitics: an independent judiciary, a regulator that regulates, and officials who answer questions. The same day the report appeared, the media regulator issued its first sanction against a pro-government channel, and the central bank governor was still declining to explain the collapse of a bank under her supervision.

Those are the tests that matter most to Serbian citizens, not only to Brussels. The new majority should treat this report as its baseline — and publish, a year from now, its own account of what changed.