The Threshold

Brussels needed one night to lecture Albania and nine months to caution Serbia. Its own Parliament had already documented Belgrade’s abuses. The difference is not what the two governments do to their citizens, but what Brussels fears they might do to it.

By Ardit Rada (Tirana)

On Saturday, under electoral silence, police acting for the Higher Public Prosecutor in Belgrade took Dejan Lučić from his home over a TikTok video. The charge is causing panic and disorder, Article 343 of the Criminal Code. In the video Lučić says that Aleksandar Vučić will steal the election and declare victory, that a million people will come out, and that the army and police will not act against them. He instructs no one. He predicts. He spent election day in custody, and RTS carried the news the same evening.

Article 343 is written for the false alarm. It punishes whoever, by presenting or spreading false news or allegations, causes panic or a serious disturbance of public order. Among the former Yugoslav republics only Serbia and Montenegro still have it; most European states have nothing like it. The offence has two elements and the prosecution needs both: a statement of fact that is untrue, and panic or disorder that actually follows from it. Lučić supplied neither. A forecast of what a government will do on Sunday is not news, true or false; it is an opinion about the future, and on the morning of the vote the opposition’s own candidates were saying the same thing from every stage in the country. And nothing followed. No crowd formed, no square filled, no polling station was disturbed. The prosecution knows this. Its statement to Tanjug says Lučić “wanted to cause panic and fear among citizens”. Wanted to. The office charged with proving a result is describing a motive, because the result does not exist. The same article has been used once already in this crisis: after 15 March 2025 a Belgrade prosecutor opened an inquiry into whether the protesters who said they had been hit by an acoustic device had committed Article 343 by saying so. First the victims, then the forecaster. The law was not applied. It was borrowed.

Lučić is a conspiracy writer of thirty years’ standing. Albania has his twin. Alfred Cako, a Balli Kombëtar deputy in 1997, has spent the decades since on television explaining who really runs the country. This month he addressed the protests on the boulevard, demanded the prime minister’s removal, called him a traitor and urged an uprising. No prosecutor has opened a file, and none will. He will be on Top Channel again this week.

The two men are the measure. What the Union’s executive said about the two states, and when, is the case.

Albania’s courts have spent two weeks refusing their government. Judges declined the security measures the prosecution requested for people detained in the riots and sent them home, some of them filmed throwing objects at police. The government has complained publicly and has no instrument to overturn a single ruling. These are the courts the Union designed, whose judges it paid to vet, and whose independence it has certified chapter by chapter. Their first serious test under public disorder has produced exactly what the Union said it wanted: a bench that rules against the executive of the day.

Serbia’s prosecution is the office of Zagorka Dolovac, whose name protesters chant beside Vučić’s. In the week before the vote it ordered arrests in Novi Sad for planning election-day unrest, an arrest in Kraljevo for incitement to violent change of the constitutional order on the basis of a plan to bring about eighty people to the capital, and then Lučić. The same office has brought no charge over the acoustic device used on Kralja Milana on 15 March 2025, which the European Court of Human Rights ordered Serbia in April to stop using, none against the masked men with bats filmed working polling stations in March from behind police lines, and in two years has put no one on trial for the sixteen people killed under the Novi Sad station canopy.

The Albanian Health Ministry’s count for the eight nights from 13 to 21 October is 320 injured: 192 police officers, 92 protesters and 36 bystanders, six of them journalists. The police were facing petrol bombs, fires and an explosive drone flown at the prime minister’s office. The arrests were for arson, looting and assault on officers; no one was detained for speech. In Serbia, in one night in August 2025, riot police clearing blockades in four cities detained seventy-nine people and hospitalised four students, one with a broken collarbone. The Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights recorded that children were arrested that week.

On 14 October, the morning after the first night in Tirana, with thirteen injured and six of them police, the EU Delegation issued a statement. It expressed concern at the violent escalation, said it was aware of allegations of excessive use of force by police against protesters and journalists, and expected police actions to be proportionate and the allegations investigated as a priority. On 18 October the Commission called for proportionality. On 19 October the European Parliament’s Albania delegation and its standing rapporteur asked for an investigation of police force. On 23 October twelve MEPs wrote to Kaja Kallas about disproportionate police force in Albania. One week, four interventions, on a country where the casualty list ran two to one against the police and the courts were releasing the detainees.

The Belgrade record for the same formula is longer to find. The Serbian protests began in November 2024. The acoustic device was used in March 2025. The Delegation’s first statement in the conditional came in August 2025, nine months in, with students in hospital: a call on all sides to de-escalate, a statement that police action must be proportionate, and that suspicions of excessive force must be investigated. The one time a Commissioner used the word “unacceptable” about Serbia was Marta Kos after the March 2026 local elections, and her subject was the masked men, not the police. On a man jailed for a video on the eve of a national vote, and on the week of arrests before it, the Delegation has issued nothing.

The European Parliament, on 22 October 2025, by 457 votes to 103, recorded that the Serbian authorities had “resorted to violence against political opponents and the use of excessive force against demonstrators”, listed the sonic weapon, police brutality and torture, and named “politically motivated prosecutions by the Higher Public Prosecutor”, the office that arrested Lučić. The Court in Strasbourg issued its order on the acoustic device six months before that. The Parliament has said it. The Court has said it. The Commission and its Delegation, who hold the enlargement file and write the reports, have said “all sides”.

The words the executive uses are the same in both capitals. The threshold is not. In Tirana the formula is reached after one night, with the police taking most of the injuries and the courts doing what Brussels built them to do. In Belgrade it is reached after nine months and an acoustic weapon, and it has never once been exceeded, not for children in custody, not for sixteen dead without a trial, not for a prosecutor’s office that the Union’s own Parliament has named as political.

The Commission holds the evidence for both. It wrote Albania’s judicial reform and grades Serbia’s every year. It knows which prosecution answers to one man and which bench rules against its own government. With that knowledge it spends its disciplinary vocabulary on the state that accepts it. Tirana replies to a statement by asking what else is required. Belgrade replies by summoning the ambassador and calling Moscow. A lecture is cheap in one capital and expensive in the other, and the Commission has priced accordingly.

That is the threshold. It is not set by what a government does to its citizens. It is set by what the government will do to Brussels in return. Albania has never made a statement expensive, and so it receives them. Serbia has made every statement expensive, and so it receives the formula, late, with “all sides” attached. The enlargement reports call this conditionality. It is the opposite. It is the discount the Commission gives to the state that frightens it, paid for by the state that does not.