There is a strange paradox at the heart of the European Union’s policy towards Serbia.
The more obvious it becomes that Aleksandar Vučić’s system is incompatible with the political standards required for EU membership, the more carefully Europe treats him as an indispensable partner.
Everyone in the EU knows perfectly well that a country with systematically distorted elections, captured institutions and suffocated media does not meet the conditions for membership. They also know that, under such circumstances, Serbia cannot realistically complete the reforms required to join.
The calculation is different. Europe fears that if it pushes Vučić too hard, he may move Serbia more decisively towards Russia and China. So, rather than confronting the contradiction between his European rhetoric and authoritarian practice, Brussels repeatedly chooses accommodation.
This is the Vučić trap.
Europe tells itself it is being pragmatic. Serbia is essential for the stability of the Western Balkans; Russia is meddling, China is investing, Kosovo remains unresolved and Bosnia is fragile. Vučić appears to offer predictability and a promise he will eventually steer Serbia westwards.
But this calculation rests on a fundamental misunderstanding.
Vučić does not provide stability. His political system increasingly survives by producing instability and then presenting him as the only person capable of containing it.
Europe is not buying stability in Serbia. It is buying time.
And time is precisely what an increasingly authoritarian system needs.
A regime without legitimacy
Nearly two years of student-led protests have fundamentally changed Serbian politics.
The government has irreparably lost something that no amount of institutional control can restore: legitimacy.
Yet losing legitimacy has not meant losing power.
Vučić’s regime has managed to regain the political initiative despite the scale and persistence of public protest. One reason is the fragmentation of the democratic camp: the government’s opponents may together represent a larger part of Serbian society, but remain divided over leadership, strategy and the political form an alternative should take.
Meanwhile, the conditions for the forthcoming elections are deteriorating further. Serbia is experiencing what can only be described as expanding media darkness. The takeover of the country’s remaining major independent television stations N1 and Nova threatens to leave the democratic opposition with virtually no nationwide space in which to communicate with citizens.
This is not stability.
It is the consolidation of a system that has lost democratic legitimacy while strengthening its ability to prevent democratic change.
And Europe’s response matters enormously.
Rewarding the wrong Serbia
The greatest irony is that the EU’s attempt to preserve influence over Vučić is weakening its influence over Serbia.
Europe is increasingly rewarding the wrong Serbia.
Serbia being rewarded is not the Serbia that wants independent institutions, free media and credible elections. It is not represented by the students and opposition supporters who have filled the streets, or by citizens who continue to protest despite pressure and intimidation.
It is Serbia represented by a deeply anti-European political elite that is steadily moving the country away from the democratic standards on which the European project rests.
Recent polling by the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy illustrates the problem. Support for European integration is strongest among younger citizens, precisely the generation at the centre of Serbia’s democratic mobilisation. Two-thirds of citizens who oppose the regime support EU membership, while support is significantly weaker among core supporters of Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party and its coalition partners (only one quarter).
Europe, in other words, risks alienating its natural constituency in Serbia in order to avoid alienating a political leader whose base contains many of the country’s most deeply anti-Western voters.
Imagine the perversity of this situation. A Serbian citizen spends decades believing that European integration means stronger institutions and freer elections, only to watch European leaders embrace the man responsible for dismantling them.
The lesson is not subtle. Europe says that it stands for rules, but apparently the rules are negotiable; that democracy matters, but apparently less when the right geopolitical arguments/threats are placed on the table.
For Vučić, this is the perfect arrangement. At home, Europe is portrayed as hostile and perpetually plotting against Serbia. In Brussels, he presents himself as the responsible European partner - the only man capable of preventing Serbia from falling into Russia’s or China’s orbit.
It takes remarkably little for those invested in seeing it that way to declare that Vučić is moving away from Moscow: a visit by Zelensky to Belgrade is enough, while the deep and enduring cooperation between the authoritarian systems in Belgrade and Moscow, including between their security establishments, is conveniently overlooked.
The contradiction is not a weakness in his political strategy.
It is its essence.
The false choice
Behind European policy lies a fear I hear increasingly often in Brussels and some EU capitals: what if the alternative to Vučić is worse?
What if his fall brings nationalists, pro-Russian forces or political chaos?
Vučić understands this fear perfectly and constantly works through its emissaries to reinforce it. Every democratic alternative can be portrayed as fragmented, inexperienced or secretly more radical than the government it seeks to replace.
And so the vicious cycle continues.
The policy designed to prevent instability is helping to create the conditions for much greater instability in the future.
A recent analysis by the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy describes this trajectory as “managed instability”: a political crisis maintained through controlled repression, institutional capture, calibrated violence and the deliberate exhaustion of democratic forces.
The objective is not necessarily to convince citizens that the government is good. It is enough to convince them that change is impossible.
That is not stability.
It is a pressure cooker, with a timer quietly counting down to its downfall.
Enlargement cannot be a geopolitical reward
The problem extends beyond Serbia.
European Union is right to recognise that enlargement has once again become a geopolitical necessity. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated that the space outside the Union is not politically neutral but a potential battlefield.
But geopolitical urgency must not become an excuse for abandoning the logic that once made enlargement successful.
The great achievement of European enlargement was not simply that more countries joined a larger market. It was that membership offered societies a credible political horizon.
The direction was clear: the closer a country came to meeting European democratic standards, the closer it came to membership.
Today, however, a different and more dangerous logic is emerging.
The political relationship with candidate countries is increasingly shaped by the usefulness of their leaders rather than by the democratic quality of their societies.
The message to every aspiring European autocrat becomes obvious: you do not necessarily need to reform. You need to make yourself useful. You need to persuade Brussels that without you, things could become worse.
Vučić has mastered this game.
But Europe should understand what it is doing. It is not bringing Serbia closer to membership. Europe knows that Vučić’s Serbia cannot enter the Union as it is. Instead, it is prolonging the life of a political system that makes the democratic transformation required for membership increasingly difficult.
That is the real contradiction at the heart of European policy: Europe rewards Vučić today because it fears what he might do tomorrow, while every concession that strengthens his system makes eventual membership harder.
Like this, Europe is not solving the problem.
It is deepening it.
Losing Serbia
I write this not only as a Serbian, but also as a European.
A decade ago, I wrote about my father’s old European flag, whose colours had faded with time. I have thought about that image often.
In December 2023, I stood in front of tens of thousands of Serbian citizens protesting electoral fraud. I had unexpectedly brought that same flag with me. By then, the EU had become so closely associated with support for Vučić’s regime that I expected to be booed when I held it up on stage. Instead, I was applauded and, to my surprise, even saw people in the crowd with tears in their eyes. At a time when the EU had become synonymous with accommodation of Vučić, I had managed something that seemed almost unimaginable: to wave the European flag as a speaker in front of tens of thousands Serbs who had lost faith in Europe.
I spoke about what had become almost a truism in Serbia: European complacency had contributed to the dramatic decline of EU popularity. Like the colours of my father’s flag, Europe’s colours seemed to have faded. But I also argued that Europe could return, if it started paying attention again.
For a while since November 2024, I believed it was.
The European Parliament became more vocal. The new Commissioner for Enlargement, Marta Kos, brought a more assertive voice to the EU’s engagement with Serbia. European institutions increasingly began to listen to the people on the streets rather than only to the government in Belgrade.
But I am beginning to worry that we are once again drifting back towards the old logic of stabilitocracy: tolerating democratic backsliding because an incumbent leader is considered useful.
Events of the past few days have made this contradiction almost impossible to ignore. On 4 September, Kos cancelled her planned visit after the Serbian state flew general Ratko Mladić’s remains to Belgrade on a government aircraft and prepared military honours for a man convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes; only two days earlier, new revelations exposed the latest documented wave of spyware targeting in Serbia, directed against students, activists and opposition politicians.
Against this backdrop, and with snap parliamentary elections scheduled for 25 October, the decision of a respected Western policy forum, supported by several European diplomatic missions, to stage a major gathering in Belgrade with Vučić as a central interlocutor reflects the increasingly difficult-to-sustain assumption that engagement with his regime can still demonstrate, and ultimately accelerate, Serbia’s decisive turn towards the West.
The EU will never be able to defeat Russia, China or other global powers in a game of pure realpolitik. It does not have to.
Its advantage lies elsewhere: in its values, its institutions and its commitment to an international order based on rules rather than power alone.
That is not naïveté. It is the EU’s greatest strategic asset.
And that is why enlargement matters. A strict but fair enlargement policy - uncompromising on democracy, rule of law, media freedom and credible elections - is not an obstacle to European geopolitical influence. It is one of its most powerful instruments.
I do not want Serbia becoming an EU member for the sake of membership. Neither do I want it permanently excluded from Europe because Brussels chose, for the sake of short-term stability, to support a system that makes democratic transformation impossible.
I want Serbia to become a member because it has become a democracy worthy of membership.
That requires Europe to stop confusing Vučić with Serbia.
The question facing Brussels is not whether it can afford to be tougher on Vučić.
It is whether it can afford to continue rewarding the wrong Serbia.
Because the longer it does so, the more deeply it will fall into the Vučić trap, and the further Serbia, and Europe itself, will move away from the promise of a genuinely united continent.
