Delayed EU Response to the Serbian Uprising: Stability, Lithium, and European Values

Par Nadia Asaad

On November 1, 2024, a newly renovated railway station’s canopy collapsed in Novi Sad, Serbia, killing 16 people and igniting the largest civic movement in the republic’s history. The project had cost $1.5 billion, financed under the China–Central and Eastern Europe cooperation framework, and it was proudly branded as meeting “European standards.” Instead, it became a monument to systemic corruption.

February 1, 2025 - Novi Sad, Serbia. Credits: Le Monde d’Après

The Novi Sad railway station collapse launched mounting frustrations with rampant corruption and lack of transparency into a still-ongoing nationwide demand for accountability and democratic reform. However, protests are being met with increasing repression and brutality, in what the UN has called “a systematic attempt to silence critical voices.”

What Serbians hoped was a moment for the EU to step up and defend proclaimed values of transparency, accountability, and safety quickly became a demonstration of how Brussels sacrifices values at the altar of geopolitical and economic convenience.

“We are all under the Canopy”

At first, students held vigils and blocked roads. Then came the farmers, teachers, and lawyers. By March 15, 2025, Belgrade saw more than 300,000 people—Serbia’s largest protest ever—marching under the slogan “Svi smo mi pod nadstrešnicom” (We are all under the canopy).

Their demands evolved from calls for transparency to snap elections. Vučić responded with force: tear gas, stun grenades, pepper spray, arbitrary arrest, smear campaigns, and on one occasion, acoustic weapons. His declaration: “You will have to kill me if you want to replace me.”

Those who sided with the protests, students and professors alike, found themselves harassed, targeted, and punished. For a candidate state, preparing for EU accession, this should have been a red flag. Yet Brussels barely blinked.

Phantom Voters and Hollow Ballots

Tension had already been building in Serbia prior to the train station canopy collapse. Serbia’s elections in late 2023 and 2024 were marred by fraud: systematic abuse of institutions and media, with election observers filing several criminal complaints over organized voting and vote-buying. Voters from the Republic of Srpska entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina were brought to illegally register and vote in Serbia, while an estimated 100,000 “phantom voters” were reported in Belgrade. The ruling SNS party secured 129/250 seats in the 2023 elections, and emerged victorious in 2024 in most municipalities, while a fragmented opposition struggled to mount a challenge. Freedom House rated Serbia 56/100 in 2025—partly free.

The Novi Sad tragedy was only one chapter in Serbia’s saga of crony capitalism. The Belgrade Waterfront project for instance had already become infamous for unlawful demolitions and displacement, sparking the Don't Let Belgrade D(r)own movement, and becoming a leading example cited in widespread allegations of money laundering through construction.

Transparency International’s 2024 index ranked Serbia 105th out of 180 indexed countries, with 180 being the most corrupt. Yet, despite this, the EU has been willing to look the other way.

Europe’s Quiet Endorsement

The EU has since November reacted swiftly to large-scale civil mobilization against authoritarian drift in Georgia, with European institutions speaking out against repression and democratic backsliding. However, the EU remained largely silent on Serbia until September 2025, at times even signaling support for Serbian President Vučić’s regime. In October 2024, Ursula von der Leyen praised Serbia’s accession progress, and following March 15 protests von der Leyen and Portuguese PM António Costa welcomed Vučić to dinner. 

Given Serbia’s formal status as an EU candidate in early 2012, student activists looked to the European Parliament and Council as the loudspeakers of European democracy. They saw an opportunity to exert pressure on Serbia’s leadership, which still seeks to maintain a pro-European image.

In early April 2025, 80 students set out by bike from Novi Sad to Strasbourg to present their demands directly to representatives of the European Parliament. Students were greeted by more than 1,000 people, and delivered a letter describing the political situation in Serbia directly to policy makers. Then on April 25, a group of 21 students began running an almost 2,000 kilometer ultramarathon from Novi Sad to Brussels, where they met with several MEPs from various political groups to raise awareness on the worsening backsliding in Serbia. Reporters Without Borders also urged the EU to condemn the violence against journalists which had reached a record high of 34 attacks between July and August.

Behind the Silence Lies Lithium

The Jadar Valley in Serbia holds one of Europe's largest lithium deposits. When environmental protests blocked the Rio Tinto lithium mining plans in 2022, many thought the project was dead. Yet in July 2024, the decision was overturned. That same month, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Vice President of the European Commission Maroš Šefčovič, signed a memorandum of understanding with Belgrade, declaring a strategic raw materials partnership to aid the EU’s green economy transition and lessen dependency on China. By June 2025, the European Commission formally labeled Rio Tinto’s Jadar project as strategic for the EU. The irony? Rio Tinto’s largest shareholder is China’s Chinalco. So the EU’s lithium hedge against China runs through a company part-owned by China. Moreover, Rio Tinto’s track record includes the destruction of the 46,000-year-old Juukan Gorge sacred Aboriginal site in Australia and large-scale environmental damage in Papua New Guinea.

Between Brussels and Beijing

Serbia has long walked a tightrope between East and West, refusing to sanction Russia while reaping the benefits of cheap gas and Moscow’s diplomatic cover. Yet it is China that has emerged as Belgrade’s most transformative partner. The relationship, branded a “steel friendship,” has seen Beijing pour billions into Serbian infrastructure and position itself as the country’s largest single investor. By 2022, Chinese foreign direct investment reached €1.4 billion in a single year, nearly matching the combined FDI of all 27 EU member states, with a total of more than $10 billion worth of projects launched over the last 15 years. Unlike Brussels, Beijing attaches no conditions to its loans and investments, allowing Vučić to consolidate power while claiming progress. Much of the output from Chinese-backed projects in Serbia flows directly into EU markets, effectively making Serbia a gateway for China’s economic footprint in Europe. From acquiring Chinese missile systems in 2020 to hosting joint military drills with Beijing in July 2025, Belgrade has openly courted alternatives to Europe. For the EU, this creates a bind: if Vučić falls, so too might the lithium partnerships it has painstakingly secured, leaving Brussels even more inclined to tolerate his “stabilitocracy.”

Norms in Delay: Stability vs. Democracy

Scholars describe Serbia under SNS as a textbook stabilitocracy: a system where democratic institutions are hollowed out, corruption and clientelism thrive, yet leaders present themselves as guarantors of stability and progress toward the EU. This is not unique to Belgrade but a pattern across the Western Balkans, where regimes simulate reforms on paper while preserving elite capture and authoritarian control. The EU, for its part, has tolerated and even legitimized these governments because they promise order and cooperation, often prioritizing formal compliance checklists and high-level engagement with leaders over confronting deeper democratic decay. By focusing on stability rather than real democratization, Brussels has entrenched autocratic incumbents like Vučić, explaining why its reaction to Serbia’s mass uprising was so hesitant. Vučić has perfected the art of the stabilitocracy, and Brussels has bought in.

This hesitancy, however, also reflects a broader feature of EU foreign policy: its chronic normative delay. The Union’s reluctance to confront authoritarian practices in Serbia mirrors its inertia elsewhere, where lofty declarations of values rarely translate into timely action. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Israel–Palestine conflict. The recognition of Palestinian statehood has been a formal “strategic priority” for the EU since 2003, which followed a voiced European interest in the conflict long before the establishment of the European Security Strategy; as expressed in the 1999 Berlin Declaration. The EU stalled for decades, with only a handful of member states recognizing Palestine before 2025–most of them doing so under Soviet influence in the 1980s rather than as part of a contemporary European foreign policy vision—and even then, it took unprecedented civilian carnage in Gaza to push others to act. The wave of recognition in September 2025 thus represented a belated catch-up to the 147 states who had already recognized Palestinian statehood.

At the opening session of the 2017 EU Ambassadors conference, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini, also Vice President of the European Commission at the time, said of the EU’s commitment to peace between Israel and Palestine: “Being strategic also means sometimes being stubborn and keep the right parameters in place when doubts and question marks arise from time to time, here and there.” As Anders Persson (2019), Akgül-Açıkmeşe and Özel (2024) among others have argued, this slowness is often justified through the EU’s “resilience” doctrine—framed as principled pragmatism in the face of multipolar rivalry, U.S. hostility, and internal divisions.

The same contradictions in EU foreign policy have appeared closer to home. In Montenegro, Brussels pressed Podgorica into recognizing Kosovo in 2008 as part of a wider foreign policy alignment requisite for EU accession, despite 85 percent of Montenegrin citizens opposing the recognition.

It is a classic case of normative power meeting realpolitik; where strategic resources, geopolitical calculations, or fear of division intervene with the EU’s enforcement of its values.

In September 2025, nearly a year after the start of the uprising, the European Parliament finally condemned Serbia’s repression, calling for the revision of EU funds to Serbia. Yet in Serbia—where citizens took to the streets for democracy—the EU delayed, hedged, and shielded Vučić. In the process, the EU risks not only alienating Serbia’s citizens but also undermining its credibility across the Western Balkans and beyond.