Serbia's Aleksandar Vucic resigned the presidency on Sunday, ending nine years in office and setting up snap parliamentary and presidential elections amid more than a year of anti-corruption protests.
Serbia's President Aleksandar Vucic resigned on Sunday, ending nine years in the country's highest office and opening the door to snap parliamentary elections in late October followed by an early presidential vote before the end of the year. The decision leaves one of the Balkans' most durable political figures fighting for his survival at the ballot box rather than from the presidential palace.
Vucic announced the move in an address to supporters outside the presidential building in Belgrade, presenting his tenure as a stretch of peace and stability. The resignation, which he first signaled in June, follows more than a year of protests over allegations of government corruption and a deadly infrastructure failure.
The shift reshapes politics in a country balancing a long-stalled bid for European Union membership against deep ties to Russia and expanding Chinese investment. Serbia's next government will inherit all three questions at once.
Vucic became prime minister in 2014 and won the presidency in 2017. Serbia's constitution barred him from a third five-year presidential term, a ceiling that had shaped his maneuvering for months before Sunday's announcement.
Parliamentary speaker Ana Brnabic, a member of Vucic's Serbian Progressive Party, will serve as interim president until a successor is chosen. Under the constitution, a presidential election must be held within three months of a president's resignation.
Vucic said the presidential vote will come more than a month after the snap parliamentary election, already set for late October in response to the protests. Serbian voters will therefore head to the polls twice in a matter of weeks.
The unrest began with student-led demonstrations after the collapse of a renovated railway station canopy in Novi Sad. It widened into a nationwide movement as teachers, factory workers and farmers joined, bound together less by a single demand than by anger at what they described as years of corner-cutting and unaccountability.
A string of resignations by officials failed to quiet the crowds, and the demonstrations hardened this summer after accusations of police brutality. What began as a demand for answers about one station became a verdict on more than a decade of Progressive Party rule.
The movement also changed the price of staying in office. By the time Vucic announced his exit, the protesters had added a demand of their own: a vote. Within months, they got two.
Vucic is not leaving politics. He is running as his party's candidate for prime minister in the parliamentary election, leaving open the possibility that he remains the dominant figure in Serbian government even without the presidency.
The race will pit the Progressive Party against a student-led anti-corruption movement called Students Win and a pro-Western opposition coalition known as European Serbia. That lineup sets up a contest between the machinery of an entrenched governing party and the momentum of a movement born on the streets of Belgrade and Novi Sad.
Before relinquishing the office, Vucic used his constitutional powers to pardon 49 people, including 23 students and party loyalists suspected of offenses tied to what he called the terrible events of the past year and a half.
Two elections in quick succession will test whether Serbia's governing party can convert its long hold on state institutions into another term, or whether a protest movement can turn street energy into seats. Turnout, and the perceived legitimacy of the result, will matter as much as the raw count.
The outcome will also set the pace of Serbia's European Union ambitions. Vucic has said he wants membership in the bloc even as he cultivates close ties with Moscow and welcomes Chinese investment, a balancing act that has left the accession process stalled. The mood across the continent offers little reassurance -- Iceland's voters recently opted against reopening EU accession talks of their own.
For Washington and Brussels alike, the vote is a reminder that Europe's political earthquakes are not confined to its largest powers. A Serbia that tilts further toward the West, or further away, will ripple across the Balkans and into the wider competition for influence on the continent.
Serbia's next president will inherit a country still arguing over the same questions that filled its squares for more than a year: who answers for failure, and whether the institutions can be trusted to deliver the answer.
The first test arrives in late October.
Serbia's Aleksandar Vucic resigned the presidency on Sunday, ending nine years in office and setting up snap parliamentary and presidential elections amid more than a year of anti-corruption protests.
freedomlinedispatch.com
