Vučić Nominated as SNS Chief After the Defeat: The Party That Ran Serbia for 14 Years May Not Even Have a Presidential Candidate

Six days after losing the elections, Aleksandar Vučić is going back to where he started. On October 31 the main board of the Serbian Progressive Party accepted, with applause, a proposal from Miloš Vučević, who has led the party since 2023, that Vučić return to its helm. The formal decision will be taken at an extraordinary assembly on December 13. Vučević presented the SNS as "the only political party that survived the color revolution." The Student List beat it with an absolute majority and a margin of around 600,000 votes, but survival is apparently the new measure of success.

On September 27 Vučić resigned as president of Serbia to lead the list as candidate for prime minister. Today he's neither. He's left with the party.

Hubris, then dregs and slime

In front of the board members, 657 of them according to Vučević, Vučić reduced the future to three words: responsibility, change and struggle. He also said a sentence few expected to hear from him: the party must change its "hubris and arrogance," because "until we change that, we will be punished by the citizens of Serbia forever." According to him, defeat is part of life, and this time the fight wasn't waged only from inside but also from outside, "with enormous money." What money and from whom, he didn't say.

The self-criticism didn't survive to the end of the speech. Of the makeup of the new government he said those are people from the bottom. "There come moments in history when the dregs and the slime float to the surface. But after a while the dregs and the slime go back to the bottom," he said, adding about the Student List that there are "no children at all" there, but "mostly old men." That's how a man the citizens have just punished fights arrogance.

Kosovo as a party assignment

For the region, the most important part was the one that will pass most quietly. "We will have to fight and help our people in Kosovo and Metohija much more than we have done so far, because so far the state did that," Vučić said, promising that the party would protect the people there. The man who for years ran the policy toward Pristina from the highest state office now takes up Kosovo as an opposition task.

At the same time he announced a change in the party's foreign policy course, the details of which aren't yet known, and said of the new government: "When you ask them about sanctions on Russia, some say yes, others no." Serbia still has neither a new parliament nor a new government, and Vučić is already setting the stage: if anything goes wrong with Kosovo, the culprit is known. Is Kosovo a national question for him now, or the surest way to keep the party on its feet?

An election with no candidate

The calendar is interesting. The SNS assembly is on December 13, and the presidential election, triggered by Vučić himself with his resignation, must be held by December 27. Now he says the party may not run. "I didn't say we won't, but there's an option that we don't run, because under these conditions it isn't realistic," he said, and told his opponents to race by themselves: "Let them find two or three satellites to run with them." So the party that ran Serbia for 14 years is thinking of not fielding a candidate for the highest office in the state, while the acting president until the election is its own Ana Brnabić.

The speech ended with a message that needs no translation: "We're going to beat them, and much faster than you expect and than they expect." There's no new government yet, and Vučić is already counting down to its fall. The Balkans know well the leaders who treat defeat as an intermission. The question is whether Serbian institutions will withstand it better than he did this time.