Serbia

Snap Elections in Serbia: Vučić’s Flight Forward

For almost two years, students in Serbia have been protesting against the autocratic regime of Aleksandar Vučić. Vučić now intends to shift his political future from the presidency to the office of prime minister. Observers fear that the snap elections now scheduled for 25 October 2026 will not be conducted fairly.

For Aleksandar Vučić, elections have normally been an effective means of reaffirming his power and that of his ubiquitous Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Whenever a crisis arose over the past ten years, Vučić had his rule reconfirmed in elections that were neither free nor fair. But the student protests, which began after the collapse of a canopy that killed 16 people and decried corruption and poor governance, proved so powerful and attracted such broad support across the population that the president for the first time refrained from calling snap elections – apparently fearing that he might actually lose them this time.

On the one hand, however, time is running out for Vučić; on the other, the student movement appears to have passed its peak: Vučić’s second term as president ends in 2027, and Serbia’s strongman must switch to the office of prime minister before then if he wants to remain in power – a position he already held from 2014 to 2017. Which office he holds is of secondary importance to him: even as a constitutionally non-partisan president, he participated in cabinet meetings and tirelessly campaigned for the SNS.

At the same time, after almost two years the student movement is not free of contradictions: nationalist undertones have increasingly crept into its campaign, while many citizens do not believe the student assemblies are capable of fundamentally changing Serbia’s political system.

Liberals caught in a bind

And yet many democratically minded Serbs are placing their hopes in the student list. After a decade and a half in the SNS’s grip, people are describing the moment as “now or never” and placing excessive expectations on this highly heterogeneous movement. The pressure has gone so far that established opposition parties are also being urged not to stand in the snap elections called by Vučić on 9 September, in favour of the student list.

Last year, the liberal Movement of Free Citizens (Pokret slobodnih građana, PSG) worked with the Serbian Greens to build a joint pro-European electoral list – also in order to be ready to serve as an experienced coalition partner should the student list actually succeed in breaking the SNS’s dominance. However, when the Greens announced that they would not contest the election in favour of the students, the electoral coalition fell apart before the campaign had even begun.

For this reason, the ALDE member party PSG will also not contest the election: “We are convinced that bringing together all political parties that share the same vision for Serbia is the only right way to change the current regime and give the country a new direction,” said Pavle Grbović, a Member of Parliament and the party’s chairman. “Unfortunately, there is no broad coalition, so PSG will support the student list, provided that its actions and positions do not conflict with our liberal principles.”

A campaign fought on an uneven playing field

Hardly anyone in Serbia believes that the elections will be conducted fairly. Local elections in a small number of Serbian municipalities in March 2026 already saw clashes between supporters of the two camps. Both international and domestic election-observation missions recorded systematic voter intimidation, vote-buying and ballot manipulation.

Moreover, the entire country has been flooded with government slogans for weeks, while the opposition has only been allowed to put up posters since yesterday, the official start of the campaign. Newspapers and television stations – with very few exceptions all loyal to the regime – have also been praising for weeks “their president’s selfless struggle”, which is supposedly threatened by “Serbia’s enemies”. The state and military funeral honours accorded to Ratko Mladić, who was convicted of crimes against humanity, fit into a nationalist narrative according to which anyone who criticises the glorification of Serbia is a traitor to the country.

Markus Kaiser is Project Director for the Western Balkans at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, based in Belgrade.