Transformed into an Actor? The Oppositionless Parliament as a Source of Resistance to Autocratization in Serbia Between 2020 and 2022

On 21 June 2020, the then leader of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) and President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, claimed a “historic victory”. The SNS and its electoral list won 188 out of the 250 seats in the Serbian Skupština. However, in October 2020, a mere two months after the convening of the legislature, Vučić announced the holding of elections on 3 April 2022. This not only meant forfeiting the prospect to consolidate autocracy, but also contrasted with prior and subsequent snap elections in 2016 and respectively 2023 whose dates were kept imprecise until the last moment, precluding the mobilization of opposition parties and electoral observer missions. Moreover, in contrast to other convocations in the Vučić-era, the opposition-less parliament was, on average, characterized by regular plenary sittings and oversight sessions, less use of urgent legislative procedures, and more public hearings with civil society. Activities in the legislature resulted ultimately in the voting of a constitutional reform increasing the formal independence of the judiciary, which was heeded by the Venice Commission and the European Union (EU) since the very adoption of the country’s fundamental law in 2006. To put the cherry on top, while the SNS-led electoral list emerged victorious in the April 2022 elections and managed to form a legislative majority, the party did not obtain an absolute majority in the Skupština for the first time since 2012. Literature on competitive authoritarian regimes, traditionally maintains that democratic institutes, such as multi-party elections and pluralist legislatures, are upheld in countries, such as Serbia, to maintain a democratic façade and foster external legitimacy. Alternatively, explanations based on the presence of external pressure or conditionality, most notably by the EU (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2004; Vachudova 2005) could be used to shed light on the adoption of constitutional reform in 2022. However, both literatures do not provide us with an understanding of why anticipatory elections were held, and furthermore why they were organized in an orderly fashion. This leaves us with a potential third explanation, which could be drawn from literature on authoritarian legislatures, which purports that the latter could foster competition and division among regime-friendly elites, which could threaten a regime from the inside (see Bonvecchi, and Simison 2017; Wiebrecht 2024). Yet, the case of Serbia again would seem peculiar, given that instead of resorting to resource distribution or repression, the ruling majority, and particularly Vučić, opted for elections. This paper proposes an alternative explanation, drawing from a corpus of 28 interviews and data collected from the Serbian parliament. The argument of this paper is that whilst pressures from external actors and the quest for legitimacy were driving factors, the key condition was internal pressure from within Vučić’ coalition which prompted the latter to stimulate contestation. The argument has implications for the limits of electoral authoritarianism to consolidate into full blown authoritarianism, built on a personalistic regime without establishing the legislature as a power-sharing mechanism.