By Aleksandar Ivković, associate of the Centre for Contemporary Politics and news editor at European Western Balkans
During Donald Trump’s first term, a number of political science books were published examining the possible decline of democracy in the United States. Even from today’s perspective, when the president’s authoritarian instincts are even more evident, some of these reflections may appear exaggerated. On the other hand, perhaps this heightened vigilance is necessary for the resilience of democracy.
One of the books from that period was How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The authors argue that the erosion of democratic norms – unwritten rules that guide political actors – increases the risk of the collapse of the democratic system as a whole. They identified two key norms that they believed were under threat in the United States: treating political opponents as legitimate rivals rather than enemies, whose importance is self-evident, and “institutional forbearance”.
According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, institutional forbearance means “refraining from actions that, while respecting the letter of the law, clearly violate its spirit”. Where this norm is respected, politicians do not use every ounce of institutional power technically available to them, because such behaviour leads to cycles of mutual distrust, polarisation and political crises, creating fertile ground for the breakdown of democratic institutions.
Avoiding accountability
Let us turn to Serbia in 2026. In February, opposition MPs submitted a motion of no confidence in the Government to the National Assembly over the General Staff Headquarters case. This mechanism is enshrined in Article 130 of the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia. A motion of no confidence must be submitted by at least 60 MPs, and the National Assembly is required to debate it at its next session.
What happened after the opposition submitted the motion? First, the ruling majority delayed scheduling the “next session” for two months. Then a session was eventually convened with the motion on the agenda, but MPs from the ruling majority denied a quorum, and the session has not resumed to this day. Exactly as described by Levitsky and Ziblatt, the ruling majority did not technically violate the letter of the Constitution – nowhere does it state that it is obliged to ensure a quorum for such a session. However, the spirit of the Constitution was clearly violated.
This was not the first time the opposition had submitted a motion of no confidence. The same happened in November 2024 after the Novi Sad railway station canopy collapse. On that occasion, the Speaker of Parliament refused to place the motion on the agenda due to a dispute over the validity of two signatures. In that case, it was even questionable whether only the spirit or also the letter of the Constitution had been violated, since there were still far more than the required 60 signatures even without the disputed two. An appeal was lodged with the Constitutional Court, but one may assume that this became one of those cases deemed “too difficult” and left sitting in a drawer. After that episode, the opposition submitted another motion of no confidence. However, no further parliamentary session was held until early March, by which time the government of Miloš Vučević had already resigned, rendering the issue moot.
It is worth dwelling for a moment on this detail: no session of the National Assembly took place between late November 2024 and early March 2025, during a period when Serbia was experiencing the largest wave of protests in its recent history. Once again, the authorities did not technically break any rules – there was no obligation to convene a session during that period – but readers may judge for themselves whether it is in the spirit of parliamentary democracy for elected representatives to ignore such a situation entirely.
A one-party parliament
The practice of convening parliamentary sessions only when absolutely unavoidable has been visible for years, specifically since the opposition returned to Parliament in 2022 after boycotting the previous elections. A parliament without an opposition, chaired by Ivica Dačić from 2020 to 2022, was a model of efficiency – it sat for 100 days in 2021. Between 2022 and 2025, Parliament sat for an average of only 36 days a year, almost three times fewer. In recent years, therefore, there has been a clear effort by the authorities to ensure Parliament meets as infrequently as possible, while its oversight role over the executive branch is often obstructed.
In Levitsky and Ziblatt’s analysis, the erosion of democratic norms in the United States occurred within a two-party system, where Democrats and Republicans, depending on who controlled the majority, used every institutional tool at their disposal against one another. This led to frequent deadlock in Congress and dysfunction within the political system, which, according to the authors, helped pave the way for Donald Trump’s election.
In Serbia, this phenomenon is occurring in a context where a single dominant party has controlled Parliament for 14 years, resulting in the complete subordination of the legislative branch to the executive. It would not be accurate to claim that there was ever a golden age of Serbian parliamentarianism before 2012, but the now fourteen-year rule of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) has ensured that Serbia is moving further away from that ideal rather than closer to it.
Compared with other institutions, Parliament was one of the first to be subordinated under SNS rule. As early as 2017, the authorities avoided holding parliamentary sessions during the presidential election campaign in order to limit the opposition’s platform. Later that year, the majority obstructed debate on the budget by submitting hundreds of meaningless amendments. However, these actions had little impact on the popularity of the SNS. Serbian citizens have long had low levels of trust in Parliament as an institution, and its weakening therefore failed to provoke a strong public reaction.
According to an April 2026 Eurobarometer survey, only 31 per cent of Serbian citizens trust Parliament, and previous surveys show that the figure was not significantly different in 2012. Yet trust in national parliaments across the European Union is only slightly higher, averaging 37 per cent. Serbia is not isolated from broader trends of declining trust in political institutions and growing anti-party sentiment. While the authorities have certainly contributed to this trend, responsibility cannot be attributed solely to them.
Repainting the façade of democracy
The key factor here is not public pressure but the absence of consensus among political actors about the rules of the game. If politics is not a life-or-death struggle but rather a contest in which one sometimes wins and sometimes loses, preserving the shared norms of parliamentary life should benefit everyone. Those in power today may find themselves in opposition tomorrow, and the precedents they establish can later be used against them.
In a research interview conducted by the author of this article in 2018, one of the leading opposition MPs made precisely this point. Two years later, however, she became a minister in an SNS-led government, symbolically demonstrating that even among political elites the belief that governments could genuinely change through elections had begun to fade.
And once the conviction takes hold that a particular party will remain in power indefinitely, why should that party exercise restraint rather than turning parliamentary institutions into mere façades? Likewise, when the prospect of political change eventually re-emerges, why would those in power be interested in preserving democratic norms if they believe losing office would mean, at the very least, the end of their political careers? Long-term institutional norms would appear of little use to them.
Despite all the indicators showing that public trust in Parliament remains low, the fact remains that the authorities have increasingly avoided parliamentary debate, and even the mere possibility that Parliament could bring down a government through a vote. How else can one explain, for example, the obstruction of a no-confidence vote when it is perfectly clear that the government would not lose it?
All of this suggests that Parliament still matters. Strengthening it will be difficult even after a change of government, given the broader trends of declining trust in institutions. Nevertheless, the norms and standards of parliamentary democracy remain a signpost pointing in the direction that should be followed if more favourable political circumstances eventually emerge.
(Radar, 23.06.2026)
https://radar.nova.rs/politika/narodna-skupstina-sindrom-dozivotne/