Serbia's constitution names two provinces and the state governs one

What the constitution settled and what it left open

Montenegro's independence referendum in 2006 dissolved the state union of Serbia and Montenegro and returned Serbia to independence, and the constitution written that year replaced the one adopted in 1990. The National Assembly approved the text on 30 September 2006 and put it to a referendum held on 28 and 29 October 2006. 53% of the electorate voted in favour, and the constitution was officially adopted on 8 November 2006.

Read through, it describes a unitary parliamentary state of an ordinary European kind. Its treatment of territory is where it stops being ordinary. The constitution recognises two autonomous provinces, Vojvodina in the north and Kosovo and Metohija in the south, and leaves the remaining area, Central Serbia, with no regional authority of its own. Central Serbia has never had one.

Since 17 February 2008, when representatives in Pristina declared independence, the state has administered one of the two provinces its own founding text names. The government's stated position is that the declaration and any recognition of it are illegal and illegitimate, and that the territory remains the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija.

The gap shows up in the plainest administrative places. The 2022 census counted a population of 6,647,003 for Serbia excluding Kosovo, and that qualifying phrase has attached to the country's own statistics since 1999, when United Nations peacekeepers entered the territory under Security Council resolution 1244 of 10 June 1999.

Underneath sits a civil law system, historically influenced by Germanic law and to a smaller degree by French law, with a layer of Yugoslav law beneath both. It is being harmonised with European Union law as a condition of accession, which makes the legal order itself one of the things the accession process is rewriting.

The constitution has been amended once. A referendum held on 16 January 2022 put changes to the provisions on the independence of the judiciary to voters. The yes option prevailed. Turnout was reported at 30%, the lowest at any Serbian referendum since 1990, and the National Assembly adopted the amendments on 9 February 2022.

How the presidency and the government divide power

The President of the Republic is head of state, elected by popular vote to a five-year term and limited by the constitution of 2006 to two terms. The office carries command of the armed forces and the procedural duty of naming a prime minister, along with what the constitutional text calls certain influence on defence and foreign policy.

The naming procedure is worth following, because it is the point where the two halves of the executive meet. The president consults the leaders of all parliamentary parties, then names a designate, and the designate presents an agenda and a list of ministers to the National Assembly. A government takes office only when a majority of all deputies votes for it, which is a harder threshold than a majority of those present in the chamber.

Executive power is then exercised mainly by the prime minister and the cabinet, which propose legislation and the budget, execute the laws and guide foreign and internal policy. The cabinet answers to the assembly, which selects and dismisses both the prime minister and individual ministers.

Descriptions of how the office has actually been used place it further forward than the text does. Accounts of Serbian politics commonly note that the constitution gives the presidency little governing power and describe the arrangement as working in practice as a semi-presidential one, with the presidency at the centre of decisions the constitution assigns to the cabinet. This catalogue records the constitutional text, records the description, and adjudicates between neither.

The two elected offices run on different clocks. Parliamentary, provincial and local elections are scheduled every four years and presidential elections every five, so the cycles do not line up on their own.

Why the assembly runs on coalition arithmetic

The National Assembly is a single chamber seating 250 deputies, elected proportionally by secret ballot for four-year terms under the constitution of 2006. Its listed powers are broad: enacting and amending the constitution, passing laws, adopting the state budget, declaring war and peace, calling and conducting referendums and elections, appointing and dismissing the holders of independent public authorities, and supervising both the government and those holders. Ordinary decisions need a majority of the deputies present, provided more than half of them are in the room. Constitutional questions are the stated exception and take more.

Electing a whole chamber proportionally at one stroke has a predictable consequence, and Serbia has lived with it throughout the multi-party period. No single party usually wins enough to govern alone, so governments are coalitions, assembled after the count.

Parties are old here by the standards of the region. The first political organisations appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century and were formally registered as parties in 1881. The People's Radical Party dominated Serbian and then Yugoslav politics from the late 1880s until 1928. From 1918 the country was part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, until 1941; during the German occupation the administration was run largely by military personnel, right-wing politicians and former members of the Yugoslav National Movement. After the Second World War Serbia was re-established as a one-party state inside communist Yugoslavia under the League of Communists of Serbia, and after that federation broke up in 1992 it was governed until 2000 under the dominance of the Socialist Party of Serbia. Through the first decade of the twenty-first century the field was held by coalitions of centre-left and centre-right parties, among them the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party of Serbia.

The break in that sequence is dated precisely. Federal elections in September 2000 produced accusations of fraud from opposition parties, and a campaign of civil resistance led by the Democratic Opposition of Serbia culminated on 5 October, when about half a million people gathered in Belgrade and Slobodan Milošević conceded defeat. Serbia's international position changed with it: admission to the United Nations followed on 1 November 2000 and membership of the Council of Europe on 3 April 2003.

What powers Vojvodina actually holds

Serbia is a unitary state and the tiers below the republic are thin. Excluding Kosovo there are 145 municipalities and 29 cities, which are the basic units of local self-government, and 24 districts with the City of Belgrade forming an additional one. Belgrade, whose city population was counted at 1,197,714 on 1 October 2022, has an elected local government. The other districts are regional centres of state authority with no powers of their own and exist as administrative divisions.

That leaves the autonomous province as the only layer between the municipality and the republic that holds authority in its own right. One of the two provinces is governed from Novi Sad. The other is claimed.

Vojvodina's autonomy is older than the present shape of the Serbian state. The 1848 revolution in the Austrian Empire produced an autonomous territory called Serbian Vojvodina, which by 1849 had been reconstituted as the Voivodeship of Serbia and Banat of Temeschwar. The region had spent the preceding centuries under Habsburg administration while the country south of the Danube was under Ottoman rule, and it joined the Kingdom of Serbia in 1918 as a former Habsburg crownland, months before the foundation of Yugoslavia.

Provincial powers have been expanded and cut twice inside living memory. Reformers in Yugoslavia succeeded in the late 1960s in decentralising the federation, and both Kosovo and Vojvodina gained substantial autonomy. In 1989 Slobodan Milošević came to power in Serbia promising a reduction of those powers, and his allies took control in both provinces during the Anti-bureaucratic revolution, an operation that placed four of Yugoslavia's eight federal units under a single leadership and set off the conflict with the other republics.

Who lives in the province is part of why it is one. The 2022 census recorded 184,442 Hungarians, 2.8% of the population and concentrated in northern Vojvodina, alongside Slovaks, Croats, Romanians, Rusyns and Bunjevci at smaller shares. The constitution recognises Serbia as the nation-state of the Serbs, who numbered 5,360,239 in the same census, 80.6% of the counted population.

Why Serbia took the question to The Hague

Two resolutions passed the National Assembly in December 2007, and each was an attempt to fix a position before an event. The first, adopted on 26 December 2007, stated that a Kosovo declaration of independence and recognition of it by any state would be a gross violation of international law. The second, adopted the same month, proclaimed military neutrality.

The declaration came on 17 February 2008. Serbia recalled its ambassadors from the states that recognised it.

The route chosen after that was legal. On 8 October 2008 the United Nations General Assembly, by resolution 63/3, asked the International Court of Justice whether the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government of Kosovo was in accordance with international law. The proceedings were large for an advisory opinion: thirty-six member states filed written statements, fourteen submitted written comments, and twenty-eight states together with the authors of the declaration took part in oral hearings held from 1 to 11 December 2009.

The opinion was delivered on 22 July 2010, and it concluded that "the declaration of independence of Kosovo adopted on 17 February 2008 did not violate international law". The reasoning is where the narrowness of that finding becomes visible. The Court held that the question put to it required no decision on whether international law conferred a positive entitlement on Kosovo to declare independence, only on whether a rule prohibited such a declaration. It found that state practice through the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries "points clearly to the conclusion that international law contained no prohibition of declarations of independence", and that "the scope of the principle of territorial integrity is confined to the sphere of relations between States". It read resolution 1244 as having set up "a temporary, exceptional legal régime" that superseded the Serbian legal order on an interim basis and was silent on final status.

The General Assembly acknowledged the content of the opinion by resolution 64/298 on 9 September 2010. The opinion is advisory and binds nobody, it made no finding on whether Kosovo is a state, and it obliged no government to alter a recognition already given or withheld. Recognitions stood at 104 of the 193 United Nations member states in the account current in 2026, while Serbia maintained diplomatic relations with 191 UN member states, the Holy See, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and the European Union.

Set out in order, the instruments applied to the question have a shape. Each was designed to be workable, and each avoided the point.

Why Serbia has not joined a military alliance

Cooperation with NATO began in 2006, when the country joined the Partnership for Peace programme and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, and it takes part in the alliance's Individual Partnership Action Plan. It has never applied for membership, and the reason is written into the resolution the National Assembly adopted in December 2007: military neutrality was formally proclaimed, and joining any military alliance was made contingent on a popular referendum. NATO has acknowledged the position.

The referendum condition is the load-bearing clause. It moves the decision out of the hands of any government and into a national vote, and popular rejection of membership is widely attributed to the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The country has been an observer at the Collective Security Treaty Organisation since 2013 and signed the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe, and its forces have served in multinational peacekeeping deployments in Lebanon, Cyprus, Ivory Coast and Liberia.

The armed forces themselves were restructured around the same premise. Conscription was abolished in 2011. In 2024 the president approved reintroducing mandatory service of 75 days, to begin in 2026 if the government adopts the decision.

The same neutrality has been tested since 2022. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Serbia declined to join European Union sanctions on Russia, citing its own history of living under sanctions, and it is among the few states in Europe that has not imposed them. It voted to condemn the invasion, supported the United Nations resolution demanding the withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine, and supported suspending Russia from the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Where the accession process has reached

Serbia was identified as a potential candidate for European Union membership, with five other Western Balkans countries, at the Thessaloniki European Council summit in 2003. A European partnership setting out priorities for a membership application was adopted in 2008. The formal application was lodged on 22 December 2009, candidate status was granted in March 2012, the Stabilisation and Association Agreement entered into force in September 2013, and the first intergovernmental conference on 21 January 2014 opened negotiations.

Negotiation runs chapter by chapter through 35 chapters of European Union law. By December 2021, 22 of the 35 had been opened, including every chapter in the cluster on the fundamentals of the process and every chapter in the cluster on the green agenda and sustainable connectivity, and two of the opened chapters had been provisionally closed.

One chapter is unlike the rest. Chapter 35 is headed "other issues", and its first item is the normalisation of relations between Serbia and Kosovo. It was opened on 14 December 2015, alongside chapter 32 on financial control. Every other chapter asks a candidate to take on a body of European law and demonstrate that it can apply it. This one asks the country to settle the question its own constitution forecloses, and it does so as a numbered condition of membership.

The dialogue that the chapter tracks has produced agreements, and their subjects are instructive. The 2013 Brussels Agreement bound each side not to block the other in the accession process, defined the structure of the police and of local elections in all parts of Kosovo, and set out the proposal for a Community of Serb Municipalities. United States mediated talks in 2020 produced an agreement on the normalisation of economic relations and on interconnecting air, train and road traffic. In 2023 both parties agreed to a proposed normalisation agreement in the European Union mediated dialogue and, in the following month, accepted a roadmap and a timescale for implementing it. Policing, elections, roads and railways have all been agreed. Status has not been on the table.

Beyond the accession track, Serbia belongs to the United Nations, joined on 1 November 2000, and the Council of Europe from 3 April 2003, along with the International Criminal Court, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the OSCE, the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation, the Central European Free Trade Agreement, the South-East European Cooperative Initiative and the Central European Initiative.

How outside assessors describe Serbian democracy

Four bodies publish a classification of Serbia's political system and no two of them use the same scale. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated the country a flawed democracy in 2024. The Bertelsmann Stiftung's Transformation Index characterised it as a moderate autocracy in the 2025 report. Freedom House classifies Serbia as partly free and describes democratic backsliding, citing legal and extralegal pressure on independent media, political opposition and civil society organisations. International IDEA's Global State of Democracy indices place the country in the mid-range on overall democratic measures, with the weakest showing on the absence of corruption.

The four labels differ because the four instruments measure different things, over different periods, against different reference sets. What they share is subject matter: each is describing the conditions around elections, the standing of courts and the room available to media and opposition, and none of them is measuring whether votes are counted.

Elections at four levels continue on their published schedules, and the judiciary sits in a three-tiered structure that the 2022 amendments were addressed to. Each of the four assessments carries its own criteria and its own publisher, and they are recorded here as four descriptions.