Aleksandar Vučić recently demonstrated quite impressively just how direct his connection to the Serbian population is, to the situation in the country and to people’s concerns when, together with the prime minister of neighboring Hungary, he built a section of the new Chinese-financed railway line between the capitals of the both countries inaugurated. There they sat together in the train rushing through northern Serbian countryside, looking out the window together with satisfaction, and Vučić, the country’s president, waved and waved.
The only catch: Nobody waved back, at least not on the parts of the greeting tour that can be seen on the publicly distributed video. No crowds, no cheering, no visible expressions of interest in the passage of the presidentially manned train.
In retrospect, observers are puzzled as to why that was – one possible explanation would be: Vučić is already so omnipresent in public perception that such an event no longer attracts anyone from behind the stove. He appears constantly and speaks to the people both on state television and on the various private channels he controls. According to evaluations by the election observation organization CRTA, 85 percent of reporting in the run-up to this Sunday’s upcoming presidential elections has revolved around the incumbent since the beginning of the year. So if you wanted to, you could read a touch of self-irony when Vučić climbed out of a young family’s refrigerator in an election commercial and visited the baffled pregnant woman in her living room to personally explain to her that there was “a lot to do”.
In times of crisis, many people cling to the status quo
The father of the country, who takes care of the details of government work as well as the family life of his citizens: With this image, Vučić is likely to be re-elected on Sunday, and of course the grateful approval of the electorate should be appropriately clear. “Anything below 60 percent would be a failure,” he said earlier this week on a television channel that favors him; in such a case he would be “very sad and very dissatisfied” and would then let it be known. According to polls, his Progressive Party can expect between 45 and 50 percent in the parliamentary elections, which he has brought forward so that they take place on the same date.
Although many of the votes should not fly to him out of deep conviction. Analyst Srećko Mihailović from the Belgrade polling institute Demostat recently explained that many voters expressed an overall negative attitude towards the current government, but they would vote for re-election anyway. Why, that’s the “million dollar question”. Florian Bieber, head of the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz, doesn’t see such a big contradiction in this: “People get little information about alternatives from the media – and if they do, then these alternatives are presented rather negatively.”
In addition, a typical pattern is currently emerging during the Ukraine war: In times of crisis, many people tend to cling to the status quo – which is why the campaign slogan “Peace. Stability. Vučić.” aim clearly. “Many say to themselves: Even if everything is not ideal – who knows what uncertainty would arise if the opposition took power.” And finally, many people didn’t feel ideologically or politically bound to Vučić and his party, but rather for very pragmatic reasons: “For example, because they or their relatives owe their job to the party,” says Bieber, “and they’re worried that they won’t get it could lose if the party loses power.”
EU members court Vučić as the guarantor of stability in the Balkans
In addition, Vučić has so far managed to secure broad support across the spectrum of voters in the country’s foreign policy positioning. On the one hand, he repeatedly publicly acknowledges his goal of joining the EU, and on the other hand, during the Ukraine war, he attaches great importance to maintaining good relations with the Kremlin. To date, the government has not joined the European sanctions against Russia – even though the government is committed to the “territorial integrity” of Ukraine and offers the capital Belgrade as a meeting place for negotiations between the two warring countries.
From Florian Bieber’s point of view, Vučić does not pursue a clearly pro-Russian policy, but rather a pragmatic, ambivalent one. During the election campaign, Vučić emphasized several times that he was primarily concerned with protecting national interests and keeping his country out of global conflicts. And should the pressure from the EU increase on him after the elections to join the sanctions against Moscow, it is quite conceivable that he could give in to this, at least in part, says Bieber: “He also still has good relations with China, which would provide him with a substitute in many ways.”
But it is questionable whether the pressure from Brussels on Belgrade will actually increase: so far, the Europeans have been largely friendly and courteous towards Vučić, despite his legendary swerve between Brussels, Washington, Moscow and Beijing – and despite the dismantling of democracy he is pursuing (the Organization Freedom House designated the country under his leadership only as “partially free”). The other EU members have always generously ignored all of this and courted Vučić as the guarantor of stability in the Balkans. “When I made critical comments about him on talk shows or interviews in the Serbian media,” says political scientist Bieber, “the answer I got was: What’s the matter, he’s one of you, an EU man.”