Six local governments have not yet announced media competitions.
So far, 140 local governments, the Vojvodina Secretariat, and the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications have announced competitions for project co-financing of media content for 2026.
The deadline for announcing the public competition, according to the law, was March 1st.
As of today, six local governments that are obligated to do so—Bujanovac, Surdulica, which did not hold a competition for 2025, Vrbas, Gadžin Han, Šabac, and Lučani—have yet to fulfill this requirement or at least have not published it in the Unified Information System (JIS) of the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications.
It should be noted that Gadžin Han, Preševo, and Vrbas have not yet completed the media competitions for 2025, while Bujanovac has annulled its competition and has not announced a new one to distribute the allocated funds in the budget for this purpose.
Last year, the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications initiated 12 procedures against the heads of public authorities who failed to announce media competitions by March 1, 2025, for that calendar year. Additionally, 15 misdemeanor procedures were initiated against public authorities for not publishing the decision on the distribution of funds or for failing to do so within the legally prescribed timeframe, which is no later than 90 days after the competition's conclusion.
Apart from the 145 local governments that have a legal obligation to allocate funds through media competitions, last year, the city municipalities of Niš—Medijana, Lazarevac, Obrenovac, and Kostolac—also announced competitions.
Kostolac has announced a competition this year as well, while the remaining municipalities have not done so, at least for now. It should be noted that Lazarevac annulled its project co-financing competition last year and has not announced a new one since.
All competitions are available at this link.
The results of the competitions in 2025 can be found in the ANEM database.
The project of the Association of Independent Electronic Media “Participatory Monitoring of the Implementation of Project Co-Financing Processes” is supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs through the MATRA program. ANEM is solely responsible for the content, which does not necessarily reflect the official views of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
