Arno Gujon

Founder of the charity Solidarité Kosovo, which aids Kosovo Serbs, he has directed the Serbian government's Office for Public and Cultural Diplomacy since May 2024, after heading the Foreign Ministry's diaspora office from 2020. He was 12th on the list Aleksandar Vučić – United Serbia, which came second in the Serbian parliamentary election of 25 October 2026.

Career

Gujon took a master's in environmental engineering at the Grenoble polytechnic in 2007 and worked in France, Egypt and Bosnia and Herzegovina until 2010. At 19 he founded Solidarité Kosovo in response to the March 2004 violence against Kosovo Serbs and directed it from 2011 to 2020; he settled in Belgrade in 2012 and was granted Serbian citizenship in 2015 for his humanitarian work. In 2010 he tried to collect mayors' signatures for a 2012 French presidential bid on behalf of far-right movements including the Bloc identitaire; he told N1 he had been a member for six months in 2010–2011 and described the movement as neither left nor right. From November 2020 to May 2024 he was acting director of the Office for Cooperation with the Diaspora and Serbs in the Region. SNS leader Miloš Vučević welcomed him into the party in October 2023.

Positions

In a September 2025 interview with Politika, reported by Danas, Gujon said the protesters' aim was to overthrow the legally elected President Vučić and that those behind them wanted to change Serbia's foreign policy and make it a "colony"; he described the divide as left-liberal assemblies against a patriotic people. He said some in the EU wanted a "post-Serbia" cut from its roots, objected to demands that Serbia recognise Kosovo's independence, and called Vučić's policy "avant-garde", comparing it with that of Italy, Slovakia and Hungary. In March 2026, at the Alliance of Sovereign Nations summit in Washington, he spoke on energy independence, praised Vučić, Viktor Orbán and Robert Fico for backing Donald Trump's peace efforts and said Serbia was increasingly considering nuclear power, including small modular reactors.

Controversies

In 2024 Radio Free Europe (RSE) reported that the State Audit Institution, auditing the diaspora office's 2023 accounts, found it had no financial management and control system and had paid grants, its largest expense at about €1.8 million to 342 organisations, into commercial bank accounts instead of the Treasury accounts the budget law requires. Gujon called RSE's reporting inaccurate and said the grants were awarded through public calls with set criteria and an independent commission. In October 2024 RSE reported that his new office had awarded two tenders worth about €1 million in total to one Belgrade firm on the same day; an NGO director called it extracting public money, the firm rejected that and the office did not answer RSE. No proceedings over either matter have been reported.

Summarised automatically from the linked sources. Wikipedia (Serbian) · Danas · Danas · Danas · Radio Slobodna Evropa · Radio Slobodna Evropa

Photo: Office for Cooperation with the Diaspora and Serbs in the Region, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons (cropped)