Over 150 testimonies reveal how public sector employees are pressured to deliver votes and attend political rallies while some job posts are given to loyalists who staff party call centres on the clock, BIRN reported.
Oglas
Employees at the cadastre service of a small municipality in provincial Serbia were taken aback. Last month, they were asked to put their names on a list pledging their votes to the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, SNS.
“This has never happened before; everyone is in disbelief, even older colleagues who have been working here since the era of [Slobodan] Milosevic,” said an employee who spoke to BIRN on the condition of anonymity.
Despite their disbelief, everyone in the office added their names to the list.
“We all signed reluctantly, because the next step is that they transfer us as punishment to other towns that are hard to get to,” the employee said.
Employees at the Republic Geodetic Authority, RGZ – the state body responsible for land registries and which has a staff of over 2,000 – are among the most recent to become acquainted with SNS’s long-standing practice of demanding that employees of state institutions and public companies (and sometimes private ones), vote for the party and attend its campaign rallies.
This practice finally reached the RGZ employees ahead of the parliamentary elections scheduled for October 25, but it is a mass, systemic abuse that has been going on for years, observers say.
Since 2014, the OSCE’s election-monitoring arm, the ODIHR, has regularly reported on the pressure faced by voters who work in the public sector. European Commission reports have been noting the same issue since 2017.
A 2022 public opinion survey conducted by the Belgrade-based NGO CRTA, based on a representative sample of 1,075 respondents, found that 14 per cent of Serbia’s population had been pressured to vote for a particular party.
BIRN spoke with eight RGZ employees from across Serbia who reported that they are being pressured to vote for the SNS and to attend party rallies.
They said the pressure started after the new acting director Dalibor Babic was appointed in August this year.
“Ever since the new acting director arrived, they’ve been pushing us for the first time to sign the list. Since the response was very poor, they brought in a party ‘commissar’ to harass people and force them to sign,” said an RGZ employee.
The same person told BIRN that people were forced to attend an SNS campaign rally in Belgrade.
“Ahead of the rally at the [Belgrade] Arena there was a hunt to get us to sign up to go. Turnout was catastrophic even then – not even those who had signed [showed up],” the employee said, referring to an SNS rally held on October 3.
An RGZ employee in another municipality told BIRN that they were asked to go to the SNS rally in Novi Sad, which was supposed to be held in mid-September 2026.
“The week when they announced the rally in Novi Sad, we were told that the new RGZ director had asked people to go there in support of him. In other words, we should go to the SNS rally, but it was really supposed to be our support for the new director,” the employee said. “I just told them I’m not interested in any of it and that they shouldn’t ask me.”
This employee said that they have not suffered any consequences yet.
“So far, nothing. I’ve actually been wondering how many times I’ll be able to tell them no,” the employee said.
The RGZ did not respond to BIRN’s questions.
Under pressure
Serbia is heading to an early general election this weekend – one that many deem the most important since the 2000 vote that led to the fall of strongman Slobodan Milosevic.
The Serbian Progressive Party is facing its biggest challenge since it came to power in 2012.
The elections are being held after two years of student-led anti-government protests that erupted after 16 people died when a concrete canopy at the recently renovated railway station in Novi Sad collapsed on November 1, 2024. The student movement has now become the key opposition force in the election, under the name Student List.
Since the start of the protests, pressure has been building on public sector employees, both those who supported students and those who refused to demonstrate their loyalty to the SNS by attending party rallies.
Now, ahead of the elections, demands are mounting again. Around 180 people responded to a BIRN questionnaire about the pressure faced by employees in their workplaces. BIRN interviewed more than 20 respondents, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity. The interviewees included people who have never carried out any tasks for SNS, people who did so under pressure but no longer wish to, and former SNS members.
Their testimonies clearly outline the many mechanisms of coercion employees face ahead of the elections.
The demands are straightforward: pledge to vote for the SNS, add your name to the list of “safe” voters, and collect so-called “capillary” votes by listing the names and contact information of people you have got to also pledge to vote for the SNS, usually from among friends, family or colleagues.
Apart from the lists themselves – which are ultimately sent along to the party – there is no written evidence of these demands. No emails or text messages are sent.
Instead, employees are called individually into the office of their bosses or heads of department, where they are asked to pledge their vote to the SNS, or go to a rally, or collect 10 or 20 capillary votes.
Read the full BIRN story here.
Teme