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.
Work for the party or else
At a healthcare institution in the Serbian province of Vojvodina, printed forms for collecting capillary votes for the upcoming October elections began to be filled in as early as May, although the elections were only announced in September, BIRN was told by an employee there.
At the top of a list that BIRN had access to is the name of a doctor who is in charge of collecting the votes.
“He wouldn’t be in the director’s seat if he didn’t deliver capillary votes. He called the people he employed. He asked them to be loyal,” said an employee.
Those who signed the list will receive several phone calls from the SNS, including on election day. Those who compile the list and collect votes cannot simply provide data on just anyone, because every vote is verified.
“Without knowing that I had put them on that list, members of my family told them to go to hell when they [SNS] called. Then they called me to ask why the people from my list had reacted negatively to their call,” explained one employee.
The employee said they were scared at first, as they have been repeatedly told they would be fired if they did not fulfill the party’s demands, including to attend SNS rallies.
“Later I realised they can’t fire me that easily, so I stopped going. Then I was told openly – you won’t advance any further, you’re staying where you are. Because I won’t do anything for the party, I won’t go to rallies, I don’t bring in capillary votes,” the employee said.
This form of pressure – being unable to advance in the workplace – is only one of the mechanisms used to punish refusal to work for the party. Other forms of punishment include pay cuts, transfers to worse positions, or transfers to distant workplaces that create difficult daily commutes.
Such punishments were not only given to those who refused to work for the party, but also to those who showed support on their private social media accounts for the 2025 mass protests. BIRN has previously reported about the large number of dismissals in the public and private sector for supporting the protests or refusing to attend SNS rallies.
Workers who do not have an employment contract but are engaged through a temporary or occasional work contract, a service contract, or hired through agencies or youth cooperatives frequently face a carrot and stick situation. Their engagement can be extended if they work for the party, with promises of eventual permanent employment. If they refuse, they face termination.
“This is an abuse of existential dependence and fear. It is classic abuse, a mechanism of pressure that they [the SNS] have developed,” Brankica Jankovic, former longtime Commissioner for the Protection of Equality, told BIRN.
“Sometimes the pressure comes in the form of ‘well-meaning’ advice – ‘it would be good if you did this’ – sometimes it is more, sometimes less sophisticated, but sometimes the methods are quite brutal,” she said.
SNS activists on state salaries
There are many employees who do not need to be pressured because they were hired specifically to work for SNS during working hours.
Thirteen people told BIRN that in the companies or institutions where they work, many people have been hired over the past few years that work for the party and do not even show up at their office of employment.
“She came, came to the company for a day and a half and then disappeared,” one person told BIRN. “Now she’s in the [SNS] call centre.”
Another person told BIRN: “For example, I had two colleagues who didn’t even come to work. Practically, they show up, stay until nine, then go to the SNS call centre.”
A third person told BIRN about a conversation they had at work. “I immediately ask – where are the new ones? They laugh, what do you mean where, in the call centre.”
These three quoted individuals are employed in three different state institutions.
Although some of these hires do not come to work for months at a time, they receive regular salaries and on top of their salaries are often paid overtime and incentives.
“These people do not work overtime. That means it’s only for loyalty,” said healthcare employee told BIRN.
One of the tasks these types of hires carried out was to stay in a camp set up by SNS supporters in a park in central Belgrade between the presidency building and the parliament, nicknamed Caciland.
Employees of Belgrade’s public utility company Infostan were regulars at the camp, some even sleeping in tents there. For their attendance, they received additional money.
Infostan has also employed people who do not show up to their official workplace at all and are instead working for the SNS, even posting photos of themselves at SNS stands on social media during work hours.
“From 2019 until today, almost all new employees are in some way SNS activists. That is literally a condition of their employment,” said one Infostan worker.
They said these new hires usually do not come to work for months at first.
“We already know that they will show up, we’ll meet them, and then they won’t come here for months. They’re either at stands or in call centres. Then, once they’ve done what they have to do, suddenly they get a contract and appear as normal workers,” the Infostan employee told BIRN.
Infostan did not respond to questions from BIRN.
One employee of a large company in the energy sector said that the firm employed around 2,000 people 15 years ago, and today has almost 9,000 employees.
“It’s a serious vote machine. They give people employed on fixed-term contracts a carrot – that they have to vote for them [SNS], go with them on election campaigns,” he explained.
He and another employee from a different state-owned energy company confirmed that employees from the energy sector travelled to the central Serbian town of Arandjelovac to work for the SNS, during working hours, for the local elections in the town in March this year.
“We’re not just talking about election day, we’re talking about the campaign, they went to work door to door,” the employee said, adding these party activists have been receiving salaries in the meantime as if they were working full-time shifts.
This employee told BIRN that party-based hiring existed before 2012 – when the SNS came to power – but political affiliation wasn’t as important then.
“If a craftsman, a welder, needed to be hired, if someone really needed to do a particular job, well, they could even vote for the Radicals [extreme nationalist party]. They hired people for the jobs that needed to be done and didn’t pressure anyone, didn’t force anyone. But these people [the SNS] haven’t hired a single person who didn’t also have to do something for them,” the employee said.
Former Equality Commissioner Brankica Jankovic said that the phenomenon of party-based hiring did not begin with the current government, but that it has “brought it to the scale of systemic discrimination on the grounds of political beliefs”.
“There is a completely different treatment of people who support the ruling party and those who aren’t interested in politics at all. That is discrimination, because the former simply enjoy the benefits, while the latter are forced to support the party,” said Jankovic.
She added that many people are not aware of their labour rights. And for some loyalists who are given preference in public sector jobs, Jankovic said, “They think the party is their employer, and I’ve heard exactly that from many of them – they say the party is their company.”
Tijana Uzelac also contributed to this article.