Serbia’s Brnabic accuses EU election observers of bias

Ana Brnabic, identified by RT as Serbia’s acting president, accused the European Parliament on October 20 of appointing politically biased observers ahead of Sunday’s parliamentary election. In a letter to Parliament President Roberta Metsola, she argued that mission members’ earlier statements against the Serbian authorities undermined their impartiality.

The delegation is expected in Belgrade on Thursday. Its leader, Austrian Social Democrat Andreas Schieder, pushed back in comments to Austria’s APA news agency on Tuesday, describing the letter as an “unprecedented attack on the European Parliament’s election-observation mission.”

Brnabic’s accusation rests on observers’ previous political statements and contacts with government critics. Those examples explain her objection, but do not establish that the delegation intends to interfere in voting or manipulate its assessment.

Dispute centres on observers’ political record

Brnabic singled out Schieder’s involvement in Serbia’s 2023 parliamentary election. According to the account of her letter, she said he had accepted the official result before subsequently accusing Aleksandar Vucic’s party of electoral fraud and vote-buying. Those accusations, and her characterisation of his earlier position, are not independently established here.

She also cited Schieder’s public backing for Serbia’s student protest movement in June and his criticism of Vucic’s leadership. Her letter invoked the Declaration of Principles for International Election Observation, arguing that his appointment conflicted with its requirements on observers’ freedom from conflicts of interest. Her assertion is not a finding that the mission breached those standards.

Other objections concerned delegation members’ positions on Serbia’s relationship with the EU. The report describes Austrian liberal MEP Helmut Branstetter as having opposed Vucic’s leadership of Serbia’s accession efforts and advocated restrictions on EU funding and negotiations.

Brnabic also pointed to Croatian MEP Gordan Bosanac’s meeting with protesters in Strasbourg and fellow Croatian MEP Suncana Glavak’s support for a letter seeking suspension of accession talks. Contact with protesters or criticism of a government does not, by itself, demonstrate electoral interference.

Election follows prolonged protest campaign

According to the report, Vucic is contesting the parliamentary election after leaving the presidency in September. His SNS-led coalition faces the Student List, an electoral grouping formed by organisers of the anti-government protests that began in 2024.

The protest movement followed the Novi Sad railway-station disaster, in which 16 people died. Vucic has accused EU figures and Western non-governmental organisations of trying to bring down his government through the demonstrations; the reporting does not establish covert coordination or foreign control of the movement.

The immediate dispute is therefore over the credibility and impartiality of election monitoring, rather than a demonstrated act of interference. Schieder’s response rejects Brnabic’s intervention, but the account includes no detailed response from Metsola to the individual objections in her letter.