Frustration within the European People’s Party is growing over Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), with senior lawmakers urging the party presidency to consider suspending or expelling it from the EPP.
Gathered in Toulouse for their political assembly on Tuesday, EPP senior members expressed deep concern over events at the funeral of Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladić, known as the Butcher of Bosnia, who died in late August aged 84 in a UN detention facility in The Hague.
They concluded that state honours and the participation of senior Serbian officials at the funeral “cannot be ignored” in the party's ongoing scrutiny of SNS.
“There is not an inch of Vučić's policies that would fit into the EPP universe. EPP is for the people, not for autocrats,” senior EPP MEP Lukas Mandl told Euronews. Vučić served as SNS president from 2012 to 2023, when he handed over the leadership to Miloš Vučević, but he is still widely considered the party’s de facto leader.
Mandl argued that the Serbian party should be expelled, pointing to the “terrible misbehaviour around the funeral of one of the last European war criminals of the 20th century."
The presence of senior Serbian officials at the funeral of the convicted war criminal already prompted a flow of condemnations from the heads of the EU's institutions.
The EPP's scrutiny process of SNS was launched a year ago, after the Serbian government's crackdown on demonstrations against corruption, and is expected to conclude by the end of this year.
However, no decision will be taken before the Serbian elections, scheduled for 25 October, according to an EPP official. Vučić, who resigned as president last Sunday, is currently standing as SNS’s candidate for prime minister.
EPP leader Manfred Weber has also been critical of the Serbian government’s involvement in Mladić’s funeral, but has so far stopped short of proposing that SNS be stripped of its membership.
According to EPP rules, a suspension or exclusion should be proposed by the Presidency or by seven other parties coming from at least five different countries, and ultimately decided by the Political Assembly.
The scrutiny process has neither a specific timeline nor a predefined outcome.
"We understand the concerns expressed by our EPP partners and take them seriously. We believe that maintaining this partnership is important for strengthening political dialogue between Serbia and our European partners, and for advancing Serbia's EU accession process," SNS International Secretary Ana Brnabić told Euronews.
SNS has been an EPP associated member party since 2016.
