Serbia votes on Sunday, and the election silence is anything but silent: the regulator is counting minutes on N1 and Nova S

On Sunday, October 25, Serbia goes to a snap parliamentary election. According to the Republic Electoral Commission, 6,450,523 voters are on the electoral roll. Election silence has been in force since Friday: for 48 hours before the vote and on election day itself, until the polling stations close, no campaign programming may be broadcast.

Silence - on paper, at least. In practice the first day was spent hunting for violations. The Regulatory Body for Electronic Media (REM) issued a statement with Swiss-watch precision: on October 23, from 07:53 to 07:55 and from 08:02 to 08:18 on Nova S's breakfast show "Probudi se," from 08:03 to 08:04 on "Novi dan" and from 08:21 to 08:22 on "Vesti" on N1, content was recorded that breached the election silence rules. The technical department informed the editors. That's it.

What was broadcast? According to pro-government media, at 08:21 N1 ran a report targeting the country's leadership and repeated it at 09:07, while the Nova S website carried an article about a businessman from the ruling SNS who invested more than half a million euros in the Vista Rica fund and who signs contracts with Elektrodistribucija, the pension fund and the National Bank. Does election silence mean not campaigning - or not mentioning the people in power?

A pro-government tabloid had its own way of respecting the silence: its editor-in-chief phoned the Republic Electoral Commission and members of the REM Council live on air, demanding that someone punish the two channels. Council member Rodoljub Šabić replied that he hadn't watched any television since the morning and that monitoring is done by the technical department, and then ended the call.

Another Council member, Miloš Garić, confirmed the law had been broken - but also that REM has little power here. N1 and Nova S are cross-border channels that still answer to the regulator in Luxembourg. "We can file complaints, beyond that there's not much we can do," Garić said, adding that REM cannot instruct the telecoms regulator Ratel to switch off their channels. The very fact that switching them off is even being mentioned two days before an election says enough about the temperature.

The pro-government side also claims the two channels have attacked President Aleksandar Vučić for years and banned him from appearing on them. That's one side's claim, in a campaign where every side has its own cameras.

On Friday afternoon, police in Belgrade stopped a student from the Faculty of Agriculture. In the bag he was carrying they found 20 cans of pepper spray, and in the car, by his own account, there were boxes with more than 500 cans of pepper spray and several radio sets. Pro-government media immediately concluded that riots were being prepared for election day. The circumstances of the case are still being established.

We know election silence back home too. But when the regulator measures violations to the minute on the channels that criticise the government, while its members speak live on a pro-government outlet's programme, it's a fair question: is the same magnifying glass held up to every other channel? And who is the silence actually protecting - the voter, or someone else? The answer, as usual in the Balkans, will only come after the count.