Politics
Serbia Schedules Election For Guy Who Already Counted The Ballots
By Sean Vanity, . BSN Network. Satire.
BELGRADE, Serbia. Aleksandar Vučić, who has served as Serbia's prime minister, then its president, and at certain points arguably its entire government, is facing a national election this year amid what his office described in a Tuesday statement as "a dynamic and participatory moment for Serbian civic life."
The statement was 1,400 words long and mentioned Vučić by name 31 times.
Vučić has governed Serbia in various official capacities since 2012, which means he has personally overseen every election he has ever lost, every election he has ever won, and the paperwork for both. Political analysts describe his governing style as "authoritarian with a Brussels-facing smile," which is not technically a recognized category but has been enough to keep Serbia in EU accession talks for eleven years without actually joining.
Eleven years. At this point Serbia and the EU are basically a couple that keeps almost moving in together and then one of them finds a reason.
The restlessness among Serbian voters is real. Mass protests have rattled Belgrade since late 2024, triggered by the collapse of a concrete canopy at a railway station in Novi Sad that killed fifteen people. The opposition and a significant portion of the public blame the accident on government corruption and construction contracts awarded to politically connected firms. Vučić's government blamed the contractors, then the inspectors, then called for a commission, which is the administrative equivalent of leaving a voicemail for the problem and hoping it dies.
Vučić has responded to the protests by describing them as foreign-funded destabilization efforts, a characterization he also applied to the 2023 protests, the 2022 protests, and a 2019 petition about a highway. At some point the foreign funders are going to want a return on investment.
On the international positioning: Vučić has spent years telling the European Union that Serbia is absolutely committed to democratic values and Euro-Atlantic integration, while simultaneously maintaining Serbia's refusal to sanction Russia over Ukraine, hosting Serbian-language Kremlin media, and visiting Moscow often enough that he has presumably accumulated frequent flyer miles. When asked about the tension between these positions, Vučić told reporters last year that Serbia is "on its own path," which is a sentence that technically means nothing and has been his foreign policy for a decade.
Elon Musk, who commented on Serbian politics briefly via X in early 2025 following the protests, wrote that "free speech is under attack everywhere" without specifying which side of the barricades he thought was doing the attacking. The post received 2.4 million impressions. It did not mention Novi Sad.
The opposition, a loose coalition of parties unified primarily by their mutual dislike of Vučić and, slightly less reliably, each other, is hoping that protest energy translates into votes. Their challenge is that Vučić controls the dominant broadcast networks, commands a party apparatus with tentacles in every municipal government, and has the particular political talent of appearing, simultaneously, as the strong defender of Serbian identity and the responsible European statesman, depending entirely on which camera is pointed at him.
He has been doing this for twelve years. He is very good at it.
Vučić addressed supporters at a rally in Belgrade last month, telling the crowd that Serbia "stands at a crossroads between its glorious past and a future of dignity and prosperity." He has used the phrase "crossroads" in public addresses 47 times since 2017, according to a tally kept by a Serbian political science student who began the project ironically and has since become visibly tired.
Polling shows Vučić's Serbian Progressive Party with a substantial lead. The opposition disputes the polling methodology. The polling firms note that their methodology is the same one that correctly predicted the last four elections, which is the kind of observation that does not make anyone feel better.
The ballots are printed. The cameras are on. The crossroads, per tradition, is directly behind him.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-09-10/serbia-s-longtime-leader-vucic-faces-restless-public-in-election