Srpska Lista holds Kosovo’s Serbs for Belgrade, delivers their votes to Vučić, and rewards its leaders with careers in Serbia. The embassies that preach pluralism keep shaking its hand.
By Albatros Rexhaj | 16 October 2026
Srpska Lista is not a Kosovo Serb party. It is a branch of the Serbian Progressive Party, opened in Kosovo in 2013 for two purposes, and it has served both faithfully ever since.
The first purpose is to hold the Kosovo Serbs. Not to represent them. To hold them, the way a landlord holds a building: every Serb seat in the Assembly but one, every Serb municipality, the Serb minister the constitution guarantees, so that nothing can be decided in Pristina on behalf of Serbs without Belgrade’s hand on it. The party does not hide this. In December 2016, when Vučić ordered one of its ministers out of the Kosovo government, it explained itself in one sentence: “Vučić is our prime minister, not Mustafa” [“Vučić je naš premijer, a ne Mustafa”]. The year before, the Serbian government had announced in its own press release who the party’s new president would be. Last week its current president, Zlatan Elek, sat in a Belgrade studio speaking for Vučić’s list in Serbia’s election and told the host he was a member of SNS. Then he mentioned he was no longer a member of Kosovo’s Assembly. Nobody in Kosovo had been told. A man with no public biography was sworn into the seat a few days later. That is what holding looks like.
The second purpose is to deliver votes. Every time Serbia votes, the Kosovo Serbs are counted in. In December 2023, when Pristina would not allow Serbian polling on its territory, the party put them on buses to Kuršumlija, Raška, Vranje and Tutin: almost 24,000 people, and 72 percent of them voted for Vučić. In 2022, 80 percent voted for him personally. A community that had argued, weighed and chosen would not produce those numbers. A community whose salary, pension and hospital arrive from one place, and whose party tells it which box keeps the money coming, produces them every time. A Belgrade newspaper wrote the morning after the 2023 election, without malice, that Serbs from Kosovo vote for whoever is in power because they have to live. That is the honest description. Srpska Lista calls it unity.
And the people who run the branch? I say this as someone who spent years inside the international missions that let it happen: their leaders do not stay with them. Nine Srpska Lista people have been ministers or deputy prime ministers of Kosovo. Five of them, the moment Pristina let them go, were given jobs in the Serbian state. One was a state secretary in Belgrade within the month of his dismissal. Two were elected to Serbia’s parliament, and one of them is on Vučić’s list again this month. The ordinary Serb in Štrpce or Leposavić gets the bus to Kuršumlija. The man who tells him to board it gets a ministry in Belgrade when the bus comes back. That is the deal, and everyone in the north knows it, and nobody is allowed to say it, because the party that holds the building also holds the jobs, and anyone who stands against it, as Branimir Stojanović did in Gračanica, as Oliver Ivanović did in North Mitrovica before he was shot dead in 2018, finds out quickly what the Office for Kosovo thinks of him.
Now the saddest part. None of this would work without the internationals. The embassies in Pristina have known since 2016, when the party told them in writing whose prime minister it obeyed, that they were not dealing with Kosovo Serb representatives. They dealt with them anyway. After Banjska, when the party’s vice president took responsibility for an armed attack on Kosovo’s police and withdrew to Serbia, where last week he stood beside Vučić’s son at an SNS rally under an Interpol notice, they dealt with them anyway. In April 2024 the Quint and the EU Office wrote a statement regretting the party’s boycott of the recall vote and referred, in their own words, to “other Kosovan Serb political actors”. So they know there are others. And on 8 October this year the head of EULEX received Srpska Lista as his Serb interlocutor, the evening before its president went on Serbian television as a man of the ruling party.
Every one of those meetings did two things at once. It told sixty thousand Kosovo Serbs that there is one door and Belgrade holds the key, so there is no point in building a party of their own, no point in a candidate who answers to Gračanica rather than to the Office for Kosovo. And it handed Vučić, free of charge, the most reliable 17,000 votes in Serbia, delivered by a party that the international community had just confirmed as legitimate. Brussels and Washington wanted neither outcome and produced both, year after year, because it was easier to sit down with the branch office than to ask who owned it.
That is what accomplice means. Not intent. Convenience, repeated until it became policy. The Kosovo Serbs have no democracy of their own, Vučić has a province that votes for him on command, and the embassies that preach pluralism to everyone else in the Balkans built the arrangement by shaking its hand.
