Serbia's Vučić to resign within weeks and call snap elections

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Aleksandar Vučić and Donald Trump Jr in March 2025. Photo credit: The President's official Instagram.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić told a party rally in Belgrade on 27 June 2026 that he will resign within weeks and call early presidential and parliamentary elections, a year before his mandate expires.<br>"I will be president for only a couple more weeks, and then I will resign," he told supporters of his Serbian Progressive Party.<br>He gave no date for the resignation or for dissolving parliament, the step required before a parliamentary vote.<br>Vučić proposed that the party contest the elections under a new list named United Serbia, an echo of the United Russia party that anchors Vladimir Putin's rule, and said it would win more convincingly than ever. Under the Serbian constitution a presidential election must follow within 90 days of a resignation, and the speaker of parliament serves as acting head of state in the interim. His second and final term, due to expire in mid-2027, bars him from running again for president. He framed the announcement as help for his party rather than a departure, promising higher pensions, more money for the poor and better state health services, and pledging that the party would end corruption.<br>The announcement followed 18 months of student-led protests, the largest in Serbia since the demonstrations that brought down Slobodan Milošević in 2000, set off by the collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad that killed 16 people.<br>Resignation without departure<br>The presidency in Serbia is largely ceremonial, and the prime minister holds the greater executive power. Vučić has held one office or the other since 2014, and his party has governed since 2012. The current prime minister, Đuro Macut, a doctor with no prior political career whom Vučić installed in April 2025, has limited independent standing, and Vučić has floated a return to the prime minister's office he held from 2014 to 2017. Several of his allies have publicly called for it. Radivoje Grujic, a Warsaw-based analyst, said the move was "not at all the end of Vučić", and analysts expect Vučić to place an ally in the presidency while keeping the levers of power. Opposition and student figures call the early vote an attempt to set the terms of a contest before the movement can organise against him. Savo Manojlović, who leads the Move-Change movement, said Vučić was trying to "preempt his inevitable fall".<br>The prime minister's fall<br>Two ministers, Vesić and Momirović, had already given up their posts in November 2024. Prime Minister Miloš Vučević followed on 28 January 2025, the most senior casualty of the protests, resigning alongside the mayor of Novi Sad, Milan Đurić.<br>His departure came hours after he, Vučić and the speaker had jointly invited students to talks and promised to meet their demands. In the early hours of 28 January, four men with baseball bats came out of the party's Novi Sad offices on the Boulevard of Liberation and set upon students who were putting up stickers for a blockade of three city bridges planned for 1 February, three months to the day after the collapse. They broke the jaw of a 23-year-old art student, who was operated on that night, and injured several others. One of the four was reported to have been seen in the company of Vučević's son. The men were charged with grievous bodily harm and violent conduct, and denied the charges.<br>Parliament did not formally acknowledge the resignation for about 50 days, until 19 March, a delay opponents read as an effort to ride out the protests, and Vučić then nominated Macut, who took office on 16 April. In July 2025 Vučić pardoned the four before their trial concluded, along with others accused of attacking demonstrators, among them a woman who drove her car into a crowd, a...