The Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe today adopted a report following a mission carried out by a 15-member delegation to observe the partial local elections held on 3 April 2022 in Belgrade and several other municipalities in Serbia. On the Election Day, seven Congress teams were deployed to Belgrade, Arandelovac, Smederevska Palanka, Kula and Secanj to monitor the election procedures in about one hundred polling stations.

Rapporteur Carla Dejonghe (Belgium, IDLG) underlined that the delegation observed “an overall calm Election Day with the polling procedures conducted mostly in accordance with the according legal framework”. She welcomed, as a positive sign, the fact that “further to the inter-party dialogue facilitated by the European Parliament last year, the opposition, at all levels of government, participated in these elections”.

However, the Congress report mentions some notable procedural inconsistencies and incidents and highlights several areas for improvement which should be addressed by the Serbian authorities. This includes in particular:  voter registration, regulation of campaign and party finance, misuse of administrative resources, issues pertaining to breaches of the secrecy of the vote, announcement of results, layout and accessibility of polling stations to support the participation of voters with impaired mobility and composition as well as training and professionalisation of polling boards.

“In addition, protecting media freedom and limiting the spread of disinformation and hate speech should be at the focus of the attention in Serbia, in order to enable voters to make an informed choice”, the Rapporteur added.  

Furthermore, the Rapporteur reiterated, yet again, the Congress recommendation not to hold the presidential, parliamentary and local elections on the same day: “We believe that the conduct of concurrent elections for different levels of government should be avoided in the future, not least because national elections overshadow local issues – as it was unfortunately also the case for the April elections in Serbia.”

 Report CPL(2022)43-02

 Presentation by Carla Dejonghe, Rapporteur

 Video of the debate

 Mediabox interview with Carla Dejonghe

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43rd Session
Agenda – Web file – Multimedia (Live webcasts, interviews, videos and photo)