Serbia will explore the option of joining BRICS instead of the EU, which has made increasingly stiff demands and offered no progress toward membership in return, Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin has said.
The country applied to join the EU in 2009 and has been a candidate for membership since 2012. During the intervening years, Brussels has upgraded its demand that Belgrade normalize relations with Kosovo into a de-facto recognition of the breakaway province’s independence, failed to protect the rights of ethnic Serbs living in Kosovo, and tied Serbia’s accession to the bloc with severing relations with Moscow and imposing sanctions on Russia.
“Just tell us: ‘we don’t want you,’” Vulin told the Berliner Zeitung in an interview published on Sunday. “Why do you keep setting us conditions that we cannot fulfil? We see the EU as a partner, but we are not entirely sure that the EU sees us as a partner.”
Vulin told the German newspaper that Russian President Vladimir Putin has never forced Serbia to choose between Brussels and Moscow, or threatened to cut relations if Belgrade begins EU accession talks.
“At the same time, EU negotiators are telling us: ‘if you do not break off relations with Russia, you will not join the EU,’” he complained. “So are we partners or not? Or do we not have the right to our own interests?”
Serbia will attend the BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan later this month, with an eye on joining the growing economic group.
“It would be irresponsible if we did not explore all possibilities, including BRICS membership,” Vulin said. “If BRICS is attractive to other countries, for example the Emirates or Saudi Arabia or Türkiye, why should it be any different for Serbia? There is no doubt that the BRICS has become a real alternative to the EU.”
Since the term was first coined in 2001, BRICS has grown from an acronym into an informal alliance that has overtaken the US-led G7 bloc in its share of global GDP, has its own development bank, and has expanded from four members in 2006 – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – to five including South Africa in 2011. This year, four more countries – Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates – officially became members of the group, with Saudi Arabia currently finalizing the accession process.
In September, Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov confirmed that Türkiye had officially applied to join BRICS, becoming the first NATO state to do so.
Azerbaijan, Algeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Venezuela, Kazakhstan, Palestine, DR Congo, Gabon, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Kuwait, Senegal, and Bolivia are among the other nations that have expressed their wish to join BRICS.