Aleksandar Vučić, head of the "Aleksandar Vučić - United Serbia" list and candidate for prime minister, set off on the campaign trail in his Škoda with a speech containing everything except a surprise. In Jagodina, in front of more than 10,000 people according to a police estimate, he repeated the formula Serbia has been hearing for months: the protests are a "colour revolution", the money comes from abroad, and the neighbours are behind the opposition.

"Justice is not delivered by the street, but by institutions," Vučić said. A sentence that sounds reasonable - until you remember it comes from the man whose party has been in power since 2012, so the institutions he is talking about are run by his own government.

Billions without an address

The biggest number in the speech was about money. "They say three billion. Three billion just in the media. What has been invested, you won't believe it, is six, seven billion euros," Vučić said, adding that NGOs had received 1.3 billion euros "to tear down the state". Who invested it, through which accounts, and where the evidence is - none of that was in the speech.

Instead, there were names. "They are being helped by Kurti, Đukanović, Plenković and other foreign agencies," he said. So Pristina, Podgorica and Zagreb are supposedly taking part in Serbia's elections. Skopje, at least for now, is not on the list.

Kosovo and Republika Srpska as the campaign message

Vučić framed the election as a "decisive battle". "If the people understand that we are choosing never to accept Kosovo as an independent state, that we are choosing support for our people in Republika Srpska, that we are choosing continued economic growth... if we are disciplined, we will beat them," he said. He boasted that Serbia is third in growth and will be first next year, and brought up the dinar exchange rate as a bogeyman that returns if the other side wins.

He also hit back at the polls: according to him, CRTA claimed the opposition was 10 points ahead, and now analyst Vukadinović is talking about just 2 points. "You have dropped, and we have grown," Vučić said. He reduced the opposition's claims that he would never resign to a single sentence: "They lied about that too."

A call for calm, in a campaign full of incidents

The speech came after an evening of incidents in Niš and Novi Sad, which Vučić blamed on the "blockaders". He asked his supporters not to get into clashes: "To us they are people, even though to them we are not. We must not accept violence as a form of political action." A message that is good in itself, but one followed by heavy words about his opponents - that they would bring "war to the country" if they came to power.

For the Balkans, this is not an internal Serbian story. When a leader on the campaign trail names politicians from neighbouring states as participants in his elections, the message does not stay in Jagodina. Will anyone ask for evidence of the billions and of the neighbours' role - or, as usual in the Balkans, will the campaign end and the claims be left hanging in the air?