Manifesto for the Renewal of Serbia

01 - The anatomy of a captured state

Serbia does not merely have a problem with corruption. Serbia is a captured state. ^[6] The difference is crucial. In a country with a corruption problem, institutions exist, but they are sometimes abused. In a captured state, the institutions themselves, the judiciary, parliament, regulatory bodies, prosecution, have been emptied out and repurposed as instruments of a single political apparatus.

Under the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), the presidency, conceived by the constitution as a predominantly ceremonial office, became the center of actual power. Parliament does not function as a legislative body, but as a machine for confirming decisions already made. Parliamentary oversight is, according to the BTI 2026 assessment, a mechanism that “primarily adopts legislation in line with the president’s will.” ^[1] The judiciary is exposed to political interference on such a scale that, in politically sensitive cases involving high-ranking officials, investigations routinely never reach trial. ^[7]

The core problem: State capture is not a malfunction in the system. It has become the system itself. The SNS did not corrupt Serbian institutions, it replaced them with a parallel architecture of loyalty, where every appointment, every contract, every prosecution is filtered through a single question: does this serve the party? This is no longer governance. It is a coup d’état from within.

Organized crime networks maintain ties that reach the very top of government. ^[7] The State Aid Control Commission does not function as an independent regulator, but as a department of the Ministry of Finance. ^[7] Contracts with foreign investors are not publicly available. The connection between construction companies, state officials, and mafia figures, made visible by the collapse of the Novi Sad station, is not an anomaly, but a structural feature. ^{[8] [9]}

02 - The ecosystem of corruption

Corruption in Serbia is not merely a sequence of individual transactions. It has become an entire ecosystem. It is a self-sustaining order in which every actor, from a village clerk to a minister, functions inside a system of mutual obligations that rewards loyalty and punishes independence.

The Novi Sad railway station was renovated as a high-profile project of the Vučić administration, financed through China’s Belt and Road Initiative. When the canopy collapsed in November 2024, killing sixteen people, investigations revealed that the contractors had close ties to state officials. ^{[3] [8]} Contracts were awarded through opaque public procurement procedures. Construction documentation was withheld from the public. ^[10] The entire chain of events, from procurement, construction, inspection, and concealment, did not show only individual crime, but an entire architecture of impunity.

This ecosystem operates at every level. Public works are asphalted again only months after completion, not because of maintenance, but because every contract generates commissions. ^[11] The healthcare system has been weakened by inflated contracts awarded to intermediaries close to the authorities, leaving hospitals and state pharmacies without basic medicines. ^{[12] [13]} State aid is directed toward politically favored companies, while independent businesses are suffocated by bureaucratic obstruction. ^[7]

The corruption loop: The loop works like this: political power secures contracts -> contracts generate revenue -> revenue finances the political apparatus -> the political apparatus secures elections -> elections legitimize power -> power secures new contracts. Every element reinforces every other element. Breaking one link is not enough. The entire loop must be made structurally impossible.

03 - Media as a weapon

A captured state also requires a captured narrative. Media that once had a living public role now largely function as an amplifier of power. ^[14] The government controls key institutions for media regulation and manipulates the media market in favor of outlets that, according to the BTI 2026 assessment, spread “aggressive government propaganda.” ^[1]

Independent media and civil society face systematic harassment: smear campaigns, strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs), and sophisticated surveillance. ^[1] Police and intelligence services have used spyware, including a tool known as NoviSpy, against journalists, civil society actors, and protest organizers. The scope of the surveillance is unknown, but dozens, perhaps hundreds, of personal devices have been compromised. ^[2]

Regime media portrayed the mass protests of 2024-2026 as “foreign-funded destabilization efforts.” ^[1] The student movement was labeled a Western-organized “color revolution.” ^[14] Protest participants were called “terrorists” and “Ustaše” by the president himself. ^[15] Pro-regime media published hundreds of defamatory articles against students and university officials. ^[16]

The result is an information environment in which a significant share of citizens, especially in smaller communities and among older people, lives inside a constructed reality where the government is the victim and its critics are enemies of the state.

04 - Manufactured apathy

Perhaps the most dangerous success of the captured state is the manufacture of apathy: the creation of a society that believes nothing can be changed, that all politicians are the same, that engagement is futile. This is not a natural state. It is a carefully constructed psychological condition.

The mechanisms are multiple. From one election cycle to the next, elections are turned into an unequal contest. As many as 54% of elections in autocratic states worldwide no longer meet even minimal democratic standards ^[17], and this continues until citizens begin to believe that voting makes no sense. Media saturation with propaganda creates cognitive exhaustion. The constant delegitimization of the opposition and civil society creates the impression that no credible alternative exists. Economic precarity keeps people focused on daily survival instead of structural change.

The student movement shattered this manufactured apathy. The protests of 2024-2026 showed not only political courage, but a psychological break with the learned helplessness that the regime had carefully cultivated for more than a decade. Generation Z, the first generation to have grown up entirely under SNS rule, rejected the premise that this is normal. ^[18]

Autocracy lives on fear and apathy. Serbia’s student movement defeated both. ^[3]

05 - Brain drain

Serbia is among the countries that most severely feel the outflow of knowledge and people. According to UNDESA data cited by the Prague Process, 963,307 emigrants from Serbia lived outside the country in 2024. ^[19] The total population fell from 7.5 million in the 2002 census to 6.6 million in the 2022 census, a loss of almost one million people over two decades, ^[20] and the population continued to decline to approximately 6.58 million by 2024. ^[21] It is estimated that 51,000 people, mostly young, leave the country every year. ^[22] More than 10,000 doctors have emigrated in the past twenty years, while the average age of those who remain is 55. ^[23] Every third Serbian student wants to leave the country. ^[23] The Western Balkans as a region could lose between 25% and 50% of its skilled workforce in the coming decades. ^[24]

The scale of departure during the SNS era is especially grave. Since the party came to power in 2012, the country has lost an estimated 600,000 to 800,000 people through a combination of natural decline and emigration. This is a demographic catastrophe unfolding before our eyes. ^{[20] [21]} Serbia today ranks 136th out of 139 countries on the World Economic Forum brain drain index, third from the bottom globally. ^[25]

The reasons are no secret. Low wages, nonexistent career prospects aligned with education, a business environment poisoned by corruption and political connections, and a society in which ability is punished while loyalty is rewarded. ^[26] People do not leave because they lack patriotism. They leave because they are denied the conditions under which patriotism can be meaningfully expressed.

Brain drain creates a vicious circle: the most democratically oriented, educated, entrepreneurial citizens leave, which weakens the domestic base for reform, which accelerates institutional decay, which drives even more people to leave. ^[23] Serbia is not losing only workers. It is losing its democratic capacity and precisely those people who would build institutions, challenge the propaganda narrative, and create an economy in which staying would make sense.

The deepest wound: Every doctor, engineer, programmer, teacher, and researcher who leaves is not only a lost taxpayer. They are a lost voice for accountability, a lost voice in public discourse, a lost mentor for the next generation. Brain drain is not a side effect of the regime, it is one of its mechanisms of survival. A society emptied of its most capable and most critical citizens is a society that is easy to control and enslave.

06 - The erasure of progress

After the fall of Milošević in 2000, Serbia experienced a genuine democratic opening. By 2003, Freedom House classified it as a free country. ^[23] Institutions were being built. The economy was liberalizing. EU accession was a realistic path. Civil society was vibrant. Independent media flourished.

Every gain has now been erased.

Serbia’s Freedom House score declines year after year. ^[2] Its prospects for EU accession have never been weaker. ^[27] The country moved from defective democracy to moderate autocracy in a single decade. ^[1] Poverty and inequality remain among the highest in Europe. The role of the state in the economy has expanded, not narrowed. Structural social disparities are being prolonged and deepened. ^[1]

This is not stagnation. Stagnation would mean the country is standing still. What Serbia has experienced is regression. A deliberate, systematic erasure of the democratic progress achieved at enormous cost by the generation that brought down Milošević. After the assassination of Serbia’s first democratic prime minister, Zoran Đinđić, precisely those elements that once promised European reforms delivered an authoritarian restoration. ^[14]

The promise of authoritarian efficiency turned out to be exactly what comparative research always shows it to be: an illusion. Serbia, alongside Turkey and El Salvador, was cited by BTI as an example showing that the concentration of power creates new clientelist networks and undermines accountability instead of delivering effective governance. ^[28] Concentrated power does not deliver better roads, better hospitals, or better schools. It delivers clientelist networks, hollowed-out institutions, and a canopy collapsing on sixteen people.

Principle I - The sovereignty of institutions over individuals

No individual, regardless of popularity, mandate, or alleged necessity, may exercise power beyond what their constitutional role explicitly grants. The personalization of power is the source of every failure described in this manifesto. The remedy begins with its absolute prohibition.

Structural safeguards:

• Constitutional protection: The role of the president must be genuinely ceremonial, with executive power resting exclusively with the prime minister and cabinet, who are accountable to parliament. Any attempt to exercise influence outside constitutional authority must be grounds for impeachment.
• Judicial independence: Judges and prosecutors must be appointed through a process controlled by the legal profession, not by parliament or the executive. Constitutional court judges must serve one non-renewable term long enough to outlast any political cycle.
• Parliamentary sovereignty: Parliament must function as a genuine legislative body - with real debate, real oversight committees, real investigative powers, and real consequences for executive overreach. No law may be adopted without substantive committee review and a period for public comment.

The test: Ask whether the current system can produce the criminal prosecution of an ally of the incumbent president. Can parliament block a law favored by the president? Can a judge rule against the government without fear? If the answer to any of these questions is no, the institution is not sovereign. It is captured.

Principle II - Radical transparency as the starting point

Secrecy feeds corruption. The default state of all government activity, every contract, every appointment, every expenditure, every decision, must be public. The state must carry the burden of proving and justifying every exception.

• Open contracts: Every public procurement contract must be published in full within 48 hours of signing, in machine-readable format, in a searchable public database. There must be no exceptions for “commercial sensitivity” or “national interest” without independent judicial review.
• Asset declarations, the full network: All public officials, elected and appointed, must publish comprehensive annual asset declarations covering not only themselves, their spouses, and dependent children, but also parents, siblings, children, in-laws, godparents, and any other persons or legal entities with whom the official has a significant personal or financial relationship. The practice of hiding illicit wealth through networks of extended family, godparent ties, and trusted associates is a well-documented feature of Serbia’s corrupt ecosystem. Asset declarations must therefore encompass the entire network of relationships through which illicit wealth is hidden. These declarations must be verified by an independent body with investigative powers, authorized to trace beneficial ownership through personal networks and flag unexplained wealth discrepancies across the entire declared network.
• Beneficial ownership: Every company doing business with the state must disclose the entire chain of ownership down to the ultimate beneficial owner. Offshore structures must be banned in public procurement.
• Budget transparency: Every dinar of public spending must be visible to every citizen from allocation to expenditure. Real-time spending dashboards must be a legal requirement, not a convenience.

Principle III - An educated republic

A democracy is only as strong as its citizens’ ability to think critically. The systematic degradation of education, through curriculum quality, teachers’ salaries, institutional independence, and the very culture of intellectual inquiry, is not merely a policy failure. It is a precondition for autocracy. Citizens who know how to verify, compare, and ask questions are far harder to govern through lies. That is why every authoritarian regime, without exception, attacks education.

The attack on Serbian universities is not a theoretical danger. It is already happening. On March 31, 2026, members of the Anti-Corruption Department of the Criminal Police Directorate raided the Rectorate of the University of Belgrade, allegedly investigating the death of a 25-year-old student who fell through a window at the Faculty of Philosophy on March 26. ^[29] Police seized servers, computers, surveillance camera receivers, and documentation - items that, according to Rector Vladan Đokić, had nothing to do with the investigation. ^[30] Among the seized items were walkie-talkies, gas masks, banners, and medical supplies belonging to the student movement, which continues to hold plenums at faculties. ^[31] Pro-regime tabloids received information from the police in real time during the operation, ^[32] and the search was immediately followed by a media campaign to discredit the rector and the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy. ^[30]

As Rector Đokić told the assembled demonstrators that evening from the balcony of the Rectorate: “Sixteen people died in Novi Sad. No one was held accountable. No one was dismissed. Not a single receiver was seized. Not a single office was searched. But when the rector stands with the students, then the police come.” ^[32] The EU ambassador to Serbia called on all sides to refrain from instrumentalizing the tragedy. ^[30]

The education covenant:

• Teachers’ salaries: Teachers must receive salaries at or above the average professional wage. A society that pays its teachers wages unworthy of the work they do is a society that has declared war on its own future.
• Critical thinking as a requirement: From primary school to university, curricula must prioritize the ability to evaluate evidence, identify logical fallacies, question sources, and distinguish propaganda from information. Media literacy must be a mandatory subject, not an elective.
• University autonomy - constitutionally guaranteed: Universities must be constitutionally protected from political interference in governance, appointments, curricula, and their right to participate in public discourse. The attacks on academic freedom we witnessed during the protests of 2024-2026, from withholding salaries and research budgets, smear campaigns, surveillance, and police searches of university premises to seize material belonging to the student movement, must be made constitutionally impossible. Police entry onto university grounds must require approval from university leadership, except in cases of immediate physical danger, confirmed by independent judicial oversight.
• Civic education: Every citizen who graduates from secondary school must understand how the state works, what their rights are, how to use them, and how to recognize when they are being undermined. This is not an ornament in the curriculum. It is the foundation of the republic.

Principle IV - Economic dignity and fair conditions

People struggle to participate in democracy when they are exhausted every day by economic survival, and they cannot build prosperity when the economy is rigged to reward political connections instead of ability, innovation, and effort.

Principle V - The covenant of a free press

Without a free press, every other principle in this manifesto is unenforceable. Citizens who cannot access accurate information cannot hold power to account. A government that controls information largely controls the image of reality itself.

• Independence of media regulators: Media regulatory bodies must be constitutionally independent from the executive. Their members must be appointed through a process that includes the legal profession, journalists’ associations, and civil society, never by the government alone.
• Anti-SLAPP legislation: Strategic lawsuits against public participation must be stopped by law. Any lawsuit proven to be intended to silence legitimate public-interest journalism must be dismissed, with costs and damages awarded to the defendant.
• Ban on surveillance: The use of spyware against journalists, activists, or any citizen exercising democratic rights must be criminalized, with mandatory prison sentences. No “national security” exception may be invoked without independent judicial authorization, and such authorizations must be subject to oversight by a parliamentary committee.
• Public broadcaster reform: The public broadcaster must serve the public, not the government. Its editorial independence must be guaranteed by a governing board appointed through a transparent, multi-stakeholder process, and its funding must be protected from political pressure.

Principle VI - Citizenship designed for participation

Democracy is not merely voting every few years. It is a continuous infrastructure of participation, a system that makes it easy, useful, and meaningful for citizens to become involved in decisions that affect their lives.

• Electoral integrity: An independent, nonpartisan election commission with full investigative powers. International observation as a permanent feature, not a concession. Automatic voter registration. A ban on the abuse of state resources in campaigns. If elections are the foundation of democracy, they must be the best-maintained structure in the state.
• Civic initiative and referendum: Citizens must have the legal right to propose laws and force referendums on key issues, with clear and achievable signature thresholds. Direct democracy is not a replacement for representative democracy - it is its pressure valve and corrective mechanism.
• Empowerment of local self-government: Municipalities must have genuine fiscal and administrative autonomy. Decentralization is not merely an administrative preference, it is a structural safeguard against authoritarianism. Power that is distributed is power that is harder to capture.
• Digital civic infrastructure: State services, public consultations, budget tracking, and institutional performance data must be available through modern, accessible digital platforms. “Transparency” that requires a freedom of information request is not transparency, but a permit system and a simulation of transparency.

Principle VII - Meritocracy instead of loyalty

In a captured state, every appointment, from hospital director to school principal to court clerk, is filtered through a single question: are they ours? This inverts the fundamental principle of competent governance: that positions should be filled by the most capable available person, selected through a transparent and competitive process.

• A depoliticized civil service: A professional, independent civil service must be established through competitive examinations, with career advancement based on performance, not political affiliation. Civil servants must be legally protected from political dismissal.
• Transparency of public appointments: Every appointment to a public body must follow a published process with clear criteria, an independent selection commission, and a public explanation of the decision. Nepotism and clientelism should not merely be discouraged, but prosecuted by law.
• Performance accountability: Public institutions must publish annual performance metrics against stated goals. Institutional leaders who fail to meet minimum standards must face predefined consequences, not enjoy political protection.

The cultural shift: This principle requires more than legal reform. It requires a cultural revolution in which the question “who do you know?” is replaced with “what can you do?” This is not idealism. It is the basic rule by which every successful society in the world functions. Serbia has enough talent to become one of them, if it stops rewarding the wrong people.

Principle VIII - A system against the leader-state

Throughout Serbian history, from royal dictatorships, through Tito and Milošević, to Vučić, a recurring pattern emerges: the concentration of power in one person who presents himself as the irreplaceable protector of the nation. This pattern must become structurally impossible, not merely politically unpopular.

• Strict term limits: A total of two terms, without exception, for every elected office. Once as an MP, once as prime minister, minister, or president, and that is it. No mechanism for extension, postponement, or circumvention may exist. Peaceful alternation of power is not a courtesy, it is the primordial test of a democratic system.
• Distribution of power: No single institution, and no single official, may simultaneously have the power to block judicial appointments, control media regulation, direct prosecutorial decisions, and manage foreign investment deals. If one person can do all of this, the system is broken regardless of who that person is.
• Sunset clauses for emergency powers: Every emergency power and every lex specialis law must automatically expire within a defined period without explicit parliamentary renewal. Emergency powers that become permanent are the most common path to dictatorship.
• An independent anti-corruption agency: An agency with constitutional independence, its own investigative capacity, its own prosecutorial police, and prosecutorial authority, modeled on successful examples from Estonia, Georgia, and Singapore, must be established with an explicit mandate to investigate the powerful, not the powerless.

The question is never “is this leader good?” The question is: “what happens when the next leader is bad?” We must plan for the worst case. Always.

Principle IX - Cultural renewal and the return of identity from propaganda

Authoritarian regimes do not capture only institutions. They capture identity. They reduce a rich, complex national culture to a set of simplified narratives, usually centered on victimhood, sacrifice, external enemies, and the irreplaceability of the leader. Serbia’s culture, through its literature, science, philosophy, art, traditions of debate and disagreement, is far greater than any political program.

• Investment in culture: Funding for art, literature, film, theater, and music must be administered through independent cultural councils, not political ministries. Cultural funding must be treated as an infrastructural investment, not a patronage reward.
• Historical honesty: A national history curriculum that honestly addresses the full history of Serbia, its achievements, suffering, failures, and crimes, is not self-punishment. It is a precondition for a society that can learn, grow, and look to the future without the crutch of mythology. The cult of glorifying crimes and criminals, merely because they are ours, must be fully dismantled.
• Support for the student spirit: The energy, creativity, and moral clarity shown by the student movement, through encrypted communication networks, artistic installations, village-to-village campaigns, and principled nonviolence ^[3], are themselves a cultural achievement of the highest order. They must be celebrated, documented, and built upon as the foundation of a new civic culture.
• Redirected defiance: The Serbian concept of inat, our stubborn defiance, was taken up by the student movement and reshaped into a force for positive change. ^[14] This act of reclamation is itself a cultural act of enormous significance. Inat must no longer be fuel for destructive nationalism. It must become the engine of constructive reform through the refusal to accept that things cannot be better.

Principle X - The covenant of return - Bringing the people home

Doctors, engineers, scientists, teachers, entrepreneurs, and other people who left Serbia are not lost. According to UNDESA data for 2024, they number 963,307 emigrants from Serbia. ^[19] They are one of Serbia’s greatest unused resources. They will not return to the country that pushed them out unless the conditions that pushed them out change.

• Conditions first: No tax break or marketing campaign will bring people back to a captured state with rigged courts, propaganda media, and political hiring. The covenant of return is not a program, but a consequence. Fix the country and people will come home. They always do.
• Recognition of qualifications: Foreign degrees, professional certifications, and work experience must be recognized through a fast and transparent process. Return must be administratively frictionless.
• Diaspora engagement: Structured frameworks for diaspora investment, mentorship, knowledge transfer, and civic participation, including the right to vote in national elections, must be established. But not in local elections, which the SNS regime has abused through the importation of voters. The diaspora is not a foreign constituency. It is Serbia abroad. At present, diaspora remittances relative to investment amount to only 2.9% ^[24], representing an enormous pool of unused capital blocked by administrative barriers, government inefficiency, and corruption.
• Remote contribution: Not everyone can or wants to physically return. Legal and institutional frameworks must be created so that diaspora professionals can contribute remotely, as consultants, board members, lecturers, and investors. The walls between “those who left” and “those who stayed” must be torn down.

The promise: When a young Serbian doctor working in a German hospital reads the news from Belgrade and, for the first time in many years, thinks “maybe it is time to return” - that is the moment in which this manifesto has succeeded. Not in the adoption of a law, not in the outcome of an election, but in the restoration of hope that makes return possible.

Principle XI - The separation of church and state - Faith without vassalage

This principle is not an attack on faith. It is its defense.

Serbia is a predominantly Orthodox Christian country, and the Serbian Orthodox Church holds deep cultural and spiritual importance for millions of people. Nothing in this manifesto questions the right to faith or the significance of the Church as a spiritual institution. What this principle demands is that the Church must not serve as an instrument of political power, just as the state must not use the Church as a means of control.

The events of 2024-2026 showed how badly that boundary has been eroded.

From the beginning of the student protests, the leadership of the Serbian Orthodox Church largely took a position aligned with the state. ^[35] Patriarch Porfirije called on students to leave the protests and return to classrooms, repeating the messages of the authorities, while failing to make an equally forceful appeal to the state for accountability, transparency, and justice for the sixteen people killed in Novi Sad.

In April 2025, the patriarch, in Moscow, alongside Russian Patriarch Kirill and in the presence of President Putin, described the student protests as a “color revolution.” Theologian Vukašin Miličević assessed that the patriarch had gone there to “serve the regime” and confirm loyalty to its Russian patrons, calling such an appearance an insult to young believers who want a normal Serbia. ^[36]

Inside the Church itself, a split is visible between the hierarchy and parts of the clergy, theologians, and believers. Theologians who criticized the political alignment of the church leadership were summoned before a church court. ^[35] At the same time, parish priests, certain bishops, and several hierarchs publicly supported the students’ right to protest and condemned speech that humiliated young people and presented them as enemies. ^{[36] [37]}

The most drastic example of retaliation was the case of Metropolitan Justin of Žiča. After he was among the hierarchs who supported the students, and after his eparchy provided accommodation at Studenica Monastery to students of the State University of Novi Pazar, the Synod suspended him in February 2026, and the Assembly removed him from governing the Eparchy of Žiča in May 2026, with an official explanation citing financial irregularities. ^{[38] [39]} In public, the decision was understood as political persecution under the cloak of the Church, and professors from DUNP publicly thanked him, stating that his hospitality toward students had “cost” him serious consequences. ^{[40] [41]}

The relationship between the authorities and the church hierarchy fits a broader authoritarian pattern: the state uses the Church for national and moral legitimization, while the Church receives protection, access, and privileges in exchange for loyalty. ^[35] In such a relationship, the government and the institution benefit. Citizens, believers, and faith itself lose.

The core problem: When the patriarch describes peaceful students demanding accountability for sixteen dead citizens as participants in a “color revolution”, on foreign soil, in the presence of the leader of a country waging war against its neighbor, the Church has ceased to function as a spiritual institution. It has become a department of the regime’s propaganda apparatus. This is not a failure of faith. This is a failure of institutional independence and must be treated as such.

• Constitutional separation: Serbia’s Constitution must guarantee the complete separation of church and state. No religious institution may receive direct state funding except through transparent, competitive cultural heritage programs available to all religious communities equally. No religious leader may hold public office, and no public official may exercise authority over religious appointments or doctrine.
• An end to mutual co-optation: The state must stop using the Church as a tool of political legitimization through joint appearances, the use of religious symbolism in political campaigns, or the instrumentalization of religious holidays for political purposes. Likewise, the Church must stop using political access to advance institutional interests at the expense of its pastoral and moral obligations.
• Protection of dissenting clergy: Priests, monks, theologians, and bishops who act according to conscience, including by supporting peaceful civic movements, criticizing political corruption, or publicly disagreeing with the political alignment of their hierarchy, must be protected from church retaliation. A Church that punishes its own clergy because they stood with the people has lost the moral authority to speak in their name.
• Religious pluralism and equality: All religious communities in Serbia, Orthodox, Catholic, Islamic, Protestant, Jewish, and others, must enjoy equal legal status, equal protection, and equal access to public space. The privileged institutional position of any single church must not translate into political influence, educational monopoly, or legal advantage.
• Education and church boundaries: Religious instruction in public schools must be optional, serious, and multiconfessional in character, teaching about religion, not for religion. No religious institution may exercise veto power or influence over university governance, curricula, or the appointment of academic staff.

A message to the faithful: This principle was not written against the Serbian Orthodox Church, but for it and for the millions of Serbian Christians whose faith deserves better than to be traded for political favors. The seven hierarchs who signed an open letter in support of the students, the parish priests who stood with their communities, the theologians who spoke the truth before church authority, they represent the best of what the Church can be. A Church free from the state is a Church that can fulfill its real mission: to comfort, to challenge, to speak the truth, and to serve. A Church captured by the state can do none of that. Separation is not the victory of secularism over faith. It is the liberation of faith from politics.

Principle XII - Lustration and the ban on the return of the state’s captors

No renewal of Serbia will be possible if the people who participated in capturing the state, turning institutions into instruments of crime, suffocating freedom, poisoning society through propaganda, and looting public resources remain in positions from which they can once again govern the state.

Lustration is not revenge. It is the democratic self-defense of society.

Serbia has already missed one historic opportunity to carry out lustration. ^[42] After the fall of Milošević, people who had served the authoritarian system remained in the state administration, judiciary, police, security services, media, economy, and political life. We are living with the consequences of that failure today. The old networks did not disappear. They rebranded themselves, adapted, and returned through a new authoritarian architecture. If that cycle is not broken again, every future change of government will be only a brief pause before the next restoration.

Lustration must therefore be established as a constitutional and legal mechanism for protecting the republic from those who knowingly turned it into private property.

It must not be based on party membership, political opinion, or public unpopularity. It must be based on established personal responsibility, evidence, a public procedure, the right to defense, and the right to appeal. But when responsibility is established, the consequences must be real, long-term, and indisputable. ^{[43] [44]}

Principle XIII - Recovery of the plundered state

The captured state did not serve only to control institutions. It served plunder.

During SNS rule, political power was turned into a machine for extracting public money. Tenders were rigged. Contracts were awarded to connected firms. Public enterprises were used as party ATMs. Infrastructure projects became channels for enriching politicians, their families, godparents, intermediaries, criminals, and businesspeople who built their wealth on proximity to power rather than on real market value.

That wealth was not created by work. It was created by taking.

It must not remain in their hands.

If, after the fall of a criminalized government, the state merely changes ministers while leaving the stolen billions in private pockets, then it has not restored justice. It has only legalized the theft. The recovery of stolen assets must therefore be one of the first tasks of the renewed republic.

The basic principle is simple: everything acquired through abuse of public office, rigged tenders, corrupt contracts, political influence, hidden ownership, offshore structures, or criminal connections must be returned to the state.

Not symbolically. Not partially. Not through settlements that preserve the wealth of those who took it.

But in reality, systemically, and to the end.