Aleksandar Vučić announced on Thursday that elections in Serbia could be called within days or within weeks. And he added something you rarely hear from a Balkan leader: before entering the campaign, he will resign as president.

The reasoning sounds almost ideal. "At that point I will no longer be an official and I cannot use state resources, apart from minimal security. I don't think it can get fairer than that," he told reporters at the Serbia Palace, after a reception for participants of the "Serbia is calling you 2026" camp.

So the man is voluntarily giving up the apparatus. Only - why now? The law doesn't require it, and Vučić openly admits as much. The resignation isn't an obligation, it's a gesture. And in the Balkans, gestures usually come with the bill attached later.

A campaign without the office, but not without the power

Here's the detail any seasoned reader of Balkan politics spots immediately. Resigning the presidency is not resigning from the party. The state resource formally disappears from the picture; the party resource stays exactly where it was - same people, same media, same network. Does stripping away the title really level the field, or does it just move the field from one place to another?

Vučić says he will congratulate his political opponents if they win, but doubts they would return the favour in the opposite case. "I will accept the result if their polls are accurate and if the opponents beat us. The citizens will have the final word," he said. The sentence is carefully built - the other side's victory is framed as a hypothesis contingent on the accuracy of somebody else's polling.

Trump can wait

Asked about a possible visit by US President Donald Trump, Vučić was more concrete than he was about the election date. The conditions, he says, aren't there. "Serbia will soon have elections, and the United States has midterms. Only once these processes are finished can we realistically expect high-level visits between our countries."

Nine and a half years in power, and the election date still hasn't been said out loud. The resignation is announced but not signed. The campaign is starting, but formally hasn't started. Serbia is entering an electoral cycle in which everything is known except the one thing that matters most - when.