Under Serbian law, electoral authorities authorise foreign observers based on the opinion of the foreign ministry. If AFPI was not behind Flanigan’s application to observe, it should have been rejected.
“The oversight, therefore, lies somewhere along that chain, and how it happened should certainly be investigated,” said Ilic. “There is little doubt that, even if it did not fully go as planned, bringing in American observers was motivated by an attempt to legitimise authoritarian elections.”
The foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment; the Republic Electoral Commission said only that responsibility for registering foreign election observers for local elections lies with electoral committees at the local level.
Beside AFPI, three other US organisations were registered as observing the local elections, all of them part of Make America Great Again movement, or MAGA – The Young Republican National Federation, the International Organization for the Family and the Republicans for National Renewal. They all had interpreters from CZDS.
Ilic said their presence “represents part of a broader manipulation of the institution of election observation, which until now had been limited to domestic observers, and it is likely to continue in future elections”.
Two observers – Jake Hoffman of the National Federation of Young Republicans and Jay Patel of the Republicans for National Renewal – had already been branded “fake observers” by the European Platform for Democratic Elections, EPDE, following their glowing assessments of elections in Georgia last year.
Brian Brown came as an observer on behalf of the International Organization for the Family, IOF, which is known for promoting so-called ‘traditional values’. In a video from Sevojno, a town in western Serbia, Brown said the US could learn a lot from Serbia about electoral security.
The only concern he had was the presence of opposition activists near polling station, saying some voters may feel “intimidated”. He personally saw no violence, but elsewhere tensions exploded.
Contrary to Brown’s assessment, Jan Braathu, Freedom of Media representative at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, said on Monday that “violence and intimidation of journalists reached unprecedented levels” during the vote and urged authorities to “publicly and unequivocally condemn” such acts.