A Farmer’s Bill Meets a Brussels List
Zlatko Kokanović has spent nearly seven years campaigning against a lithium mine in his village of Gornje Nedeljice, in western Serbia. Five days before Sunday’s election he told the daily Danas, as a candidate on the Student List, that “there is no point in talking with such a company”. His answer to Rio Tinto’s Jadar project is a law permanently banning lithium exploration and mining in Serbia.
His list then won roughly 52% of the vote and a projected majority in parliament. The European Commission, meanwhile, still lists Jadar among its strategic raw-materials projects, and Rio Tinto’s own reports describe the mine as paused, to be revived “when the time comes”. Brussels and the core of Serbia’s new majority now want opposite things from the same valley. How the EU handles that gap will shape its relationship with Belgrade more than any accession chapter.
Twenty Years, Two Cancellations, One Strategic Label
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Rio Tinto found the mineral jadarite near Loznica in 2004, and the deposit could yield about 58,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate a year, enough, the company says, for 1.1 million electric-vehicle batteries. Mass protests and road blockades in late 2021 forced the government to scrap the project in January 2022. Kreni-Promeni, the activist group whose anti-Rio Tinto petition gathered 290,000 signatures, was central to that fight. In July 2024 the Constitutional Court ruled the cancellation unlawful, and the government revived the project. Days later, with Olaf Scholz in Belgrade, the EU and Serbia signed a raw-materials partnership that the German chancellor called “an important European project and contribution to Europe’s sovereignty”. Tens of thousands marched against the mine in Belgrade that August.
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