Just under half of Serbia’s citizens support EU accession, while only one in five has a positive opinion of the EU, Serbia’s leading polling expert, Srdjan Bogosavljević, has confirmed, citing a survey completed in March.
In all the Western Balkan economies, the number of citizens optimistic about the EU was less than those who would vote in favour of Serbia’s accession to the Union in a referendum, Bogosavljević said on 8 April.
Speaking at a two-day conference called ‘(The Wrong) Perception of the European Union in the Western Balkans’, the Serbian consultant for the Ipsos agency said that a survey completed in March showed that 46% of Serbian citizens would support the country’s EU accession in a referendum, but that a mere 21% of respondents had a positive opinion on the Union.
Serbia is less enthusiastic about the prospect of EU membership than before, and the region’s other economies are more supportive of it, Bogosavljević added. Meanwhile, 90% of Montenegrins would support membership of the Union, along with 77% of Albanians and 74% of North Macedonia’s population.
Bogosavljević said that the number of citizens who believed that Serbia would never join the EU had tripled over the past seven years.
“In 2015, 14% of respondents said they did not expect Serbia to join the EU ever, as opposed to this April when 43% were of the same opinion,” Bogosavljević said.
In 2008, 32% of Serbs felt that the country should not follow the path of EU membership if it was conditional on recognising Kosovo’s independence, but in 2022 this figure went up to 49%, the polling expert also said.
