Twelve Years of Aleksandar Vučić: A Balance Sheet

By setting himself and his electorate of “guardians” against the intellectuals, Vučić deepened the divide within Serbian society and allowed the protest movement to draw almost the entire academic and professional community—historically the most respected strata of Serbian society—over to its side, writes Ekaterina Entina. Vučić, despite all his foreign-policy and foreign-economic successes, has unfortunately missed the chance to emerge from this period as a legitimate rather than merely a formal victor.

Let us begin by acknowledging that drawing final conclusions about Aleksandar Vučić’s time in power is clearly premature, even though he will formally leave the presidency of Serbia on 27 September. At fifty-six, he has no intention of leaving power altogether. However, in order to gauge how great his chances are of moving from the president’s chair to the prime minister’s (it has been officially announced that, should it win, the Serbian Progressive Party will nominate him for the post of prime minister), it is worth examining how Serbia changed internally under Aleksandar Vučić, and what happened to its international positioning.

Vučić is an impressively experienced man: in politics since 1993, at the head of the ruling party since 2012, in the prime minister’s chair since 2014, and moving from there to the presidency in 2017. In effect, he has devoted the whole of his adult life exclusively to political activity. Vučić was a direct participant in the manifold transformation of Serbian political life following the collapse of the SFRY, and he came through it unscathed, leaving his ambitious rivals with nothing but memories, while he himself retained the ability to extricate himself, unconventionally but successfully, from situations with any number of unknowns. In terms of sheer devotion to politics, he is perhaps surpassed only by Montenegro’s long-time leader, Milo Đukanović, who did not leave the republic’s political stage from the late 1980s until fairly recently.

Serbia itself has faced an enormous number of internal and external challenges over the past three decades, beginning with the full-scale sanctions of the 1990s and the 1999 NATO bombing, the first “colour” revolution of 5 October 2000, through the renaissance of relations with the West in the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, with Russia and with China, and on to the new mass street protests calling for the removal of the current government, which have been gradually building over various issues since 2017 and reached their peak phase in 2025.

Serbia has, visually at least, become more attractive over the twelve years of Vučić’s rule—its façade, in any case. By relying on foreign investment and long-term loans, the country’s real economy, wrecked by the break-up of the federal state, sanctions and bombing, was rebuilt. It is worth noting, moreover, that the share of national capital in Serbia is, on average, higher than in the countries of Central and South-Eastern Europe, accounting for more than half of the total volume. Economically, Serbia cannot be compared with the leading European countries or the fast-growing Asian economies, but at the regional level it is a state—unlike Croatia, Bosnia, North Macedonia, or Bulgaria—with growing capabilities and ambitions, which fundamentally distinguishes today’s situation from that of twenty years ago. A bet has been placed on establishing a regional IT hub, a goal Serbia has been consistently pursuing both through national development programmes and international cooperation. Key trunk roads and transport corridors have been restored, the national carrier JAT has been revived as Air Serbia, Belgrade Airport has been substantially expanded, the airport in Niš is once again receiving civil aviation, and a new airport has opened in Kraljevo. Of course, almost all of these infrastructure projects have been carried out either with foreign loans or under EU and NATO programmes to strengthen connectivity across European space. Nevertheless, these changes are undoubtedly having a positive effect on Serbia’s quality of life and its international opportunities. The capital, Belgrade, and the major cities have been qualitatively transformed.

At the same time, at the international level—despite the fact that European integration was and remains the strategic imperative of Serbia’s development—Vučić and his team have succeeded in diversifying the country’s ties. As with the economy, one can point to a certain superficiality in this, but it cannot be denied. Vučić, and before him Tomislav Nikolić, inherited a multi-vector foreign policy resting on four pillars—the EU, the United States, Russia, and China—from Boris Tadić, who is considered a pro-Western president. But it was Vučić who brought it to its possible geopolitical maximum. With Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House, Belgrade began playing quite skilfully on Euro-Atlantic contradictions. The United States, of course, does not see Serbia as an equal partner, as is often claimed in Belgrade, but it does place a priority bet on developing relations with Serbs and Romanians in the sub-region—a considerable advance compared with the previous pro-Albanian stance of Democratic administrations. It must be said, though, that Vučić never managed to convert American goodwill into a resolution of the “Serbian question.” Despite the absence of any major joint Russian-Serbian projects during Vučić’s time in leading positions, and the generally low frequency of presidential-level contacts between Moscow and Belgrade over the past decade, Vučić, as we know, managed to preserve the foundation of the relationship itself by refusing to introduce anti-Russian sanctions. A step that was symbolic rather than practical, perhaps, but whose very symbolism reflects the spirit of Russian-Serbian history better than anything else could.

Serbia is the regional leader, both in scale and in substantive scope, when it comes to engagement with China. Politically, it is China that today occupies the larger share of the “non-Western” side of the scales in Belgrade’s external positioning. With Beijing at his back, Vučić was able to develop ties with the rest of the “global majority” more calmly, and did not react to Brussels’s criticism on this score whenever it arose. Over the years of his presidency, the list of actors in this category has grown: not only certain former members of the Non-Aligned Movement or the Gulf monarchies, but also such seemingly unexpected directions as Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, with which strategic partnership agreements were signed in 2022 and 2026, recpectively. Of course, not all of this cooperation with these new actors on the Balkan scene develops within the framework of diversification away from the West. Often, on the contrary, as in the case of Tashkent and Baku, this engagement serves the strategic objectives of the United States and the EU, both within the region itself and across the Eurasian continent—yet no one can deny that there is activity and an element of independence in Belgrade’s policy here too. Summing up the positive side of the ledger, one can state with confidence that, while remaining on the whole the West’s “unloved child,” Serbia under Vučić managed to make use of every opportunity that opened up in the window of global geopolitical turbulence.

At the same time, it is obvious that a strategy of total openness carries its own costs: Serbia is a heavily indebted country. Foreign-policy multi-vectorism, pursued alongside an adopted strategy of rapprochement with the West and amid rising global conflict potential, has led to Belgrade appearing an insufficiently reliable partner to everyone at once. Situational alliances with it remain possible, but the formation of long-term relationships based on trust is severely complicated.

Multi-vectorism has also been received ambivalently by the Serbian population. On the one hand, it looks with satisfaction on the growing significance of Belgrade in international affairs. On the other, this kind of positioning has required Vučić not only to start needling the EU, at least rhetorically, but also to weaken engagement with Russia. If Tadić’s pro-Western multi-vectorism consisted in giving Moscow the chance to gain a foothold in South-Eastern Europe as a key energy player, then Vučić’s multi-vectorism has, in essence, been aimed at developing engagement with Beijing and gradually minimising Russia’s presence in strategically significant areas. Infrastructure cooperation is limited, in effect, to important but small Russian Railways projects. No agreement was reached on the construction of a metro system. Official Belgrade is wary of possible cooperation with the Rosatom state corporation, even though the competitive advantages of the Russian side can hardly be disputed. Cooperation along the EAEU line is not expanding either—largely, it is true, as a result of objective logistical constraints. Belgrade’s accession as a partner to BRICS+ is not under discussion. The Russian civilian EMERCOM centre in Niš, an important link in the regional protection system, was not granted diplomatic status, on contrived pretexts, even though Serbia’s leadership, despite its “military neutrality,” went out of its way to accommodate its NATO colleagues.

At the same time as its non-accession to anti-Russian sanctions—a step of extreme importance for bilateral relations—Belgrade has taken steps that are objectively painful for Moscow: it received Volodymyr Zelensky on a state visit, took part, albeit without signing any declarations, in the “Kiev platform,” and is well aware of where the Serbian weapons supplied to third countries end up. To some extent, this is of course offset by the fact that Serbia remains the only country in Europe conducting a fully-fledged inter-parliamentary and intergovernmental dialogue with Russia, is interested in developing humanitarian ties, is well disposed towards the presence of Russian media in the country, and maintains and expands direct air links with Russia. Business visits take place on an ongoing basis. Vučić himself has learned Russian over these years. But it has still been impossible, over these years, not to notice the contradictory nature of practical Russian-Serbian engagement, notwithstanding Russia’s highly consistent position both in its political support for Serbia and in its readiness to implement major joint projects.

In the end, over the years of Vučić’s time in the prime minister’s and president’s chairs, what became the principal incentive for Russian society and the political establishment to maintain a presence in Serbia was not major economic projects, nor a consistent pro-Russian orientation on the part of the leadership—unfortunately, there has been none of that—but rather the position of Serbian society, which continues, on a mass scale, to share Russian sympathies. Is this realisation, which has taken shape within Russia, in some indirect sense an achievement of Vučić’s? Partly so, even if only as the outcome of political manoeuvring.

There is also what Vučić failed to achieve, and which has ultimately given rise to today’s avalanche of social discontent—discontent that will do everything possible to consign him and his associates to the pages of the political archive at the forthcoming early parliamentary elections. To summarise: Vučić very nearly lost sight of the fact that any society develops, and Serbian society, despite its traditionalist mentality and its fear of a repeat of the 1990s, is no exception. It seems that for a long time he believed that a certain general improvement in living standards could compensate for the distortions of economic growth and for the traditional problems of Balkan states linked to transnational crime. In reality, however, a fairly common situation arose: an improvement in living standards led to increased demands from the population for transparency in government and in how it is organised.

The problem of unprofessionalism, cronyism, and corruption, in the absence of any dialogue with the growing segment of society that these things irritated, was in large part exacerbated by Vučić himself during his years in power. How this problem built up, and why it was not noticed in time, is explained by the political structure of Serbian society, which Vučić knew in detail before becoming president.

In the 1990s, the protest wave that swept away Slobodan Milošević saw the national orientation as lying in the “normalisation” of Serbia, something that could, in practice, only be achieved through the collapse of a regime that was, in many respects, objectively “rotten” and duplicitous, and through the country’s movement along the path of Western European development. And although Vučić himself, who never counted himself among the liberals, was part of that wave, he understood perfectly well that his generation, and the generation older than his, formed the core of the pro-Western electorate for whom Europe would forever remain a symbol of political and economic success, and the path towards it would forever be tinged with the romanticism and free spirit of the barricades of the 1990s. These voters, even though often well educated and patriotic in their own way, could not become the foundation for the Serbian Progressive Party as a broad-centre party seeking to co-opt everyone—from moderate Euro-loyalists to Russophiles and the right.

Moreover, by the early 2010s, the generation of children of the war, who had lived through the fear and horror of the bombing, had reached voting age—and it is precisely they who, owing to the trauma they suffered, are far less loyal to Europe—together with the “deep people” who had seen no dividends from the change of power in Belgrade in 2000, were destined to become the main electorate of the Serbian Progressive Party in 2012. And that is indeed what happened.  

This electorate that took shape can loosely be termed the “guardians”: they firmly bound the state itself to the existence of stable, mass-oriented authority, and handed to that authority responsibility for the country’s development. In essence, like the ageing generation of Euro-loyalists, they have today found their own niche and now make up no less than a quarter of society. However, this stratum, like the Euro-loyalists, had, some five to seven years ago, simply run out of room and people to grow at the expense of. Why?

The economic growth that accompanied multi-vector political rhetoric created, among the new generations born in the early 2000s, not only the illusion that Serbia could achieve a great deal on the international stage, but also, to a considerable extent, revived a national spirit and pride in their unadulterated form. Paradoxically, without the “vatniks” (a pejorative Russian term for uncritical, jingoistic loyalists to the authorities—offered here as the closest equivalent to the Serbian slang term “čatsi,” applied to today’s supporters of Vučić), the “blokadniki” (a slang term used by supporters of the current government to describe the protesters) could simply never have formed as a civic stratum in Serbia. It was precisely the “vatniks” who, through their constant—if often inactive—repetition of theses about a strong and independent Serbia, the defence of national interests and so forth, created the conditions for the emergence of a new stratum of young patriots, raised on these uplifting affirmations. Notably, their hard core also accounts for no less than a quarter of the population. But it is extremely difficult for these people to fit into an economy already divided into spheres of influence, with fixed horizontal and vertical ties—there is simply very little room for them within it, and, unlike their predecessors, they far more rarely see life outside Serbia as a way of resolving the problem of self-realisation. Moreover, being a political technologist himself and well aware of how much a correctly presented message can decide in an electoral race, Vučić and his team placed their main bet on this group. But the grown-up new Serbian patriots were born into this information reality and possess it not at a professional level but at an intuitive one. And it is precisely at that intuitive level that they reject mass manipulation of information.

Discontent first began to be articulated within the youth group, and then spread to encompass representatives of every stratum of the population.

It is also important that this part of society, like Vučić’s “guardians,” does indeed place a national Serbia at the top of its priorities, but without any monopoly on decision-making by the ruling party—and so accusations against them of trying to organise a “colour revolution,” that is, in essence, of being bought and paid for, not only failed to reduce the intensity of passions in Serbian society, but widened the rift between the two groups of Serbian patriots, cementing in the camp of Vučić’s opponents those who were offended by the very suspicion, even if they had previously doubted, and still doubt now, the substance of the protest movement. Meanwhile, the actual organisers of the 2000 “colour revolution,” the consumers of Western grants and NGOs, remained exactly where they were: some still believe in a pro-European opposition, a bet that even the EU itself no longer places. That small but active part of the student movement, together with the “civic” forces that partly joined it—the part that really was, and remains, funded from abroad and oriented towards it—has hidden behind common protest slogans, waiting for better times after the election, and will prove a “pig in a poke” for both Vučić and his opponents.

Thus, Vučić missed the formation, growth, and consolidation of a significant part of society that, given dialogue with it and systematic recruitment into government, could have become his own renewed electorate. He was also undone by a psychological unreadiness for dialogue with intellectual circles, whom he largely—though not always—unfairly, and out of sheer inertia, regarded not as exponents of the national interest but as an extension of the “long arm” of external actors. It must be noted that Vučić himself did remarkably little over twelve years to minimise the presence of the latter: even pro-government think tanks that are, in effect, built into the machinery of state, operate not solely on budgetary funds but remain dependent on foreign, above all Western, grants. However, this does not mean that their staff are, without exception, preachers of external interests that are not their own. By setting himself and his electorate of “guardians” against the intellectuals, Vučić deepened the divide within Serbian society and allowed the protest movement to draw almost the entire academic and professional community—historically the most respected strata of Serbian society—over to its side. Accordingly, the current election campaign began under conditions in which both Vučić and his opponents abandoned any political programme, turning the forthcoming vote into a civic referendum on trust. Vučić, despite all his foreign-policy and foreign-economic successes, has unfortunately missed the chance to emerge from this as a legitimate rather than merely a formal victor. Winning is possible; remaining a national leader is not.