Protest and Resilience in Serbia and Georgia - Domestic Challenges in the Course of EU Enlargement

Two countries, Serbia and Georgia, that officially still are candidates for EU membership are facing massive waves of public protest. They are not only challenging autocratic practices of their own governments, but also the way how the EU shapes its enlargement policy. While protesters in Serbia have already become more sobered about what the EU does to protect their freedom of expression and back their demands, their Georgian counterparts are still speaking out in favour of EU-accession. The EU, in turn, is caught by its own lurching course between geopolitical and transactional considerations, paired with the efforts to uphold its identity as a normative actor by, for example, presenting its new Democracy Shield in November 2025. The paper will present insights on the interactional dynamics between protesters and EU institutions based on an in-depth document analysis and interviews. It will provide an understanding of policy-formation inside the EU, how this helps (or not) to support democratic resilience in countries with candidate status, creating a transnational arena, and how these processes influence the extent to which the social movements can uphold the support of their societies.