Author: Biljana Djordjevic, PhD, Assistant Professor
At the end of September 2026, news came that the EU was preparing draft roadmaps for Montenegro, Ukraine, Moldova and Albania. The idea is simple: countries that continue to implement key reforms should be offered a clearer path towards membership, with concrete steps and indicative deadlines for concluding negotiations.
The news took me back to 2008, when we had different roadmaps, but with a comparable purpose: to set out the steps that the countries of the Western Balkans needed to take in order to achieve visa liberalisation.
At the time, shortly after graduating and beginning my master’s degree studies, I worked on projects for the International Organization for Migration and assisted the Commissariat for Refugees of the Republic of Serbia in implementing some of the obligations under the visa liberalisation roadmap. I was proud to have taken part in work that, together with the efforts of numerous institutions and individuals, led to the lifting of visa requirements for Serbian citizens in November 2009.
Today, in 2026, there is no roadmap for Serbia. Nor is there one for several other countries in the region. But the problem is not simply that Serbia has been left out of the new initiative. It is also the company it now finds itself in because of backsliding in democracy and the judiciary: Turkey and Georgia.
How did Serbia end up in this company?
Much of the answer lies in Belgrade. For years, the European Commission has been very clear about what is holding Serbia back. Progress on the rule of law and the normalisation of relations with Kosovo determines the overall pace of accession negotiations. Added to this is a new geopolitical context in which full alignment with the Common Foreign and Security Policy has become a test of a candidate country’s political and strategic commitment to EU policy.
In other words, the problem is not that Serbia does not know what it needs to do and therefore needs a roadmap. The problem is that seriously implementing reforms, first and foremost in the area of the rule of law, would change the very way the state operates.
Unfortunately, Serbia has long ceased to be a republic and has become what I call the Savamala oligarchy – an order that emerged after the demolitions in Savamala settlement in Belgrade in 2016, carried out to accelerate the construction of Belgrade Waterfront, and is built on an alliance between the political leadership, big business and private investors. Its purpose is to privatise public goods while side-lining institutions in order to enrich an economic and political elite for whom the law does not apply in the same way as it does to ordinary citizens. Serbia lacks the rule of law and democracy needed to limit the concentration of political power, both of which are fundamental prerequisites for EU membership. Serbian citizens must fight for the rule of law and democracy regardless of any desire to demonstrate, through Serbia’s democratic credentials, their readiness and willingness to be part of the EU.
Unfortunately, citizens have often not fought hard enough for these things, leaving many with the impression that this struggle cannot be won without EU support. This is why Europeanisation was initially so closely associated with democratisation. At the same time, the rise to power of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) brought Serbia a government that declares EU membership to be a strategic goal, while building a political model that makes the conditions for membership impossible to meet. It has also actively pursued an anti-European campaign at home by downplaying the importance of the EU for Serbia, complaining that Serbia has done everything asked of it without being rewarded with the opening of new clusters, and turning towards Russia, China and Trump’s America. Over time, it became clear that the regime’s goal was to make candidate status permanent, allowing Serbia to enjoy certain economic benefits and access European funds while avoiding, by every possible means, the profound institutional changes that would constrain executive power.
The willingness of EU officials to engage with the government as a legitimate interlocutor, the emphasis placed on stability, and the fact that the SNS is an associate member of the European People’s Party have all contributed to this perception. For years, the EPP, as Europe’s largest political party, filled the EU positions most relevant to Serbia with people from its own ranks. This created the impression among a significant number of citizens that Brussels was willing to tolerate authoritarianism for the sake of stability. Instead of Europeanisation being associated with democratisation, it increasingly came to be seen as support for a particular regime rather than for democratic institutions and citizens’ rights. This also pushed many formerly strongly pro-European voters in Serbia towards Euroscepticism.
Another major reason for weak public support for European integration within Serbia is the fact that the normalisation of relations between Belgrade and Pristina was incorporated into the accession process through Chapter 35, which was opened in 2015. Since then, the EU has explicitly linked progress on normalisation to the overall pace of negotiations. When European integration is tied to the Kosovo issue, with Brussels acting as mediator in the dialogue and implementation of the commitments arising from that dialogue determining the pace of negotiations, it becomes easy to portray membership as a process in which Serbia has to “give something up” in order to get something in return. The SNS regime has repeatedly exploited this interpretation, further weakening support for European integration.
None of this means that Serbia, as a candidate country, has no bilateral disputes with EU member states. The fact is that Serbia has unresolved issues with most of its neighbours. The most serious are with Croatia and relate primarily to missing persons and the border dispute. At present, these issues do not determine the pace of accession negotiations in the way that the rule of law and the normalisation of relations with Kosovo do. Nevertheless, although the Croatian Parliament adopted a declaration pledging not to use bilateral disputes as an instrument of pressure in the enlargement process, relations between Croatia and Serbia are such that it is difficult to imagine Croatia refraining from doing so if Serbia manages to unblock its European integration process. These unstable relations are further strained by public disputes surrounding painful anniversaries such as Operation Storm, as well as by Serbia’s increasingly frequent practice of expelling Croatian citizens on the grounds that they allegedly pose a security threat because they took part in, or were present at, mass protests in Serbia following the collapse of the railway station canopy. Official Belgrade and pro-government media have described the student and civic protests as a foreign-sponsored “colour revolution”, with Croatia perhaps more frequently identified as the sponsor than any other country. Alongside longstanding animosities, this narrative has also been fuelled by the fact that students from the Stav group in Novi Sad found refuge in Croatia after being accused of attempting to overthrow the constitutional order.
The only neighbouring country with which Serbia has no unresolved issues, North Macedonia, has itself been a victim of the accession process being used to settle bilateral disputes. This has undermined the credibility of the process, exposed the candidate country to further political crises and weakened public enthusiasm for European integration. Aleksandar Vucic has frequently invoked the example of North Macedonia to point out that the country even changed its name and yet still cannot open a cluster. In doing so, he has sent Serbian citizens the message that European integration is not based solely on merit and reforms, but also on geopolitical conditions and the bilateral disputes of member states, thereby shifting part of the responsibility onto the EU itself.
Although I believe it would be beneficial to remove the possibility of vetoing membership solely on the basis of bilateral disputes, such a reform of the EU does not appear likely. Regardless of the European integration process, however, regional cooperation should mean far more than fulfilling obligations imposed by Brussels, because resolving outstanding issues with neighbouring countries is of vital interest to Serbia.
For such an approach to be genuinely embraced, we need a different Serbia. That is why Serbia’s real roadmap today cannot be a document filled with dates for opening clusters. It must be a roadmap towards a state in which governments can be voted out of office, courts can rule against the Savamala oligarchy, citizens do not depend on political affiliation to exercise their rights, state officials do not wage war on education or threaten to dismantle public universities, and students are not branded as terrorists. Only such a Serbia can enter into genuine dialogue with the countries of the region and resolve bilateral issues, while also democratising the domestic debate on foreign policy and Serbia’s strategic commitment to the European Union.