Following numerous EU reports lamenting its absence, Serbia’s media regulator finally holds constitutive session – a year-and-a-half after the previous regulatory council’s mandate expired.
Katarina Baletic
Serbia’s new Council of the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Media, REM, held its first constitutive session on Monday but failed to elect a president. The Council is still not composed completely as its ninth member has not been elected yet.
The previous REM Council’s mandate expired in November 2024. Since then, Serbia’s parliament has failed to appoint a new Council. The selection process was marked by numerous allegations of irregularities. Establishing a fully operational REM Council was one of the European Union’s key demands for Serbia as part of its rule-of-law obligations in its EU accession process.
The establishment of the new Council was enabled after four members who had previously resigned agreed to assume their positions earlier in July.
Eight members of the new REM Council were elected in November 2025. However, the ruling majority in parliament did not vote for the ninth member, who was to be chosen from representatives of national minorities. Claiming that the ruling majority had sabotaged the election because their preferred candidate would not be chosen, four of the elected members resigned in December last year.
However, on July 10, parliament adopted an interpretation of the Law on Electronic Media clarifying that the resignations had no legal effect. Following this, the four members agreed to take up their seats on the REM Council, paving the way for it to be formally constituted.
On Monday, two candidates for the president’s position, Mileva Malesic and Milos Garic, won the same number of votes. Malesic was among the candidates who had resigned in December 2025.
Afterwards, Dubravka Valic Nedeljkovic, who chaired the meeting, said consultations would continue and a new session would be held soon.
“Until a president or chairperson is elected, the oldest member of the Council, which is me, will preside until a consensus is reached,” Valic Nedeljkovic said, adding that a president must be elected before the Council can begin to address the important issues concerning the REM.
EU reports on Serbia have repeatedly urged the REM Council to be established and start operating. The latest Rule of Law Report, published in July, said: “Serbia’s audiovisual market continued to face serious challenges in the absence of a functioning decision-making body of the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Media.”
Some of the problems that the Commission noted in the absence of a regulatory authority is that the competition for the allocation of the fifth frequency for national broadcasting, launched in 2022, has not yet concluded.
Some TV channels have started broadcasting on Telekom Srbija cable without the require licence, and have also received public funding, and public officials have appeared on them.
