Serbia’s populist leader Aleksandar Vucic has dominated politics in the Balkan country for 14 years BELGRADE, Serbia -- Serbia's populist strongman Aleksandar Vucic dominated the Balkan country's politics for 14 years. The long-ruling authoritarian leader on Sunday conceded the defeat of his right-wing Serbian Progressive Party to a grassroots movement of university students who led protests for almost two years against him before unseating him in a historic change of government. The 56-year-old political veteran easily outplayed political opponents in the past and thought he could do it again.
Ahead of Sunday's ballot he pulled a maneuver in the style of his ally Russian President Vladimir Putin when he resigned the presidency to pursue a bid to become the prime minister. Vucic then launched a fierce campaign involving favorable around-the-clock coverage on state media and attacks on opponents. He handed out cash to voters and promised higher pensions, new roads and cheaper medicines.
The diverse youth movement's message that rampant corruption, cronyism and organized crime under Vucic were eating away at the country resonated widely with voters. The student protests first started in 2024 after a collapsed canopy at a renovated train station in Serbia's north killed 16 people, triggering claims that graft-fueled negligence led to poor construction work and eventually to the crash. Defiant, Vucic on Sunday blamed his defeat on foreign interference.
During the wars in the 1990s, Vucic was one of the radical party leaders who advocated the creation of a “Greater Serbia” that would include territories in Croatia and Bosnia where minority Serbs live. Those policies are widely blamed for a series of bloody conflicts that left over 100,000 people dead and displaced millions. Vucic was known for fiery speeches, including one in Serbia’s parliament where he said that for each Serb killed in the Bosnian war, 100 Bosnian Muslims must die.
He later said that he didn’t mean it literally. As information minister in the late 1990s, Vucic oversaw media critical of then-President Slobodan Milosevic slapped with heavy fines or shut down altogether. He shifted away from ultranationalism to a proclaimed pro-EU stance on the eve of his party’s electoral win in 2012.
In office, Vucic positioned himself as pro-European and pro-Russian, and as an admirer of Trump. Ahead of the decisive ballot, however, Vucic reembraced his hard right roots and turned to Putin again as he struggled to restore his shaken voter base. Vucic defied the EU last month by allowing a hero’s funeral in Belgrade for Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army commander convicted of genocide by a U.N. court in the Netherlands.
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