How Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic sees the world

On May 13, 1990, in Zagreb, two of Yugoslavia’s biggest football teams, Red Star Belgrade and the home team, Dinamo Zagreb, were set to play in the Maksimir Stadium of the Croatian capital. Among the excited Red Star fans riding on the train to Zagreb that day was a young law student named Aleksandar Vucic.

On the streets, fights began breaking out between rival fans. Cafe tables were flipped over, windows smashed. But the real ruckus erupted at the stadium, where Red Star fanatics, led by Serbian gangster Zeljko Raznatovic, aka Arkan, broke through the barrier holding them back and rushed at the Dinamo supporters, with punches and chairs thrown by both sides.

“They threw everything they had at us [until] there were no more chairs to hurl at each other,” Vucic recounted in a magazine interview 20 years later.

Dinamo supporters then stampeded the pitch, where their team jumped into the fray, assaulting police officers, and the game was officially called off before it began.

Over the next hour, authorities tried to restore order, playing soothing music over the loudspeakers to try to calm the mob. Two fire engines were dispatched to hose the fans, who pelted the trucks with stones.

Trading insults and fisticuffs are hardly unusual in football hooliganism, but the riots laid bare the ethnic fault lines that would soon lead to the violent breakup of Yugoslavia.

“It was already a conflict between Serbs and Croats, not Red Star and Dinamo fans,” Vucic explained in the same interview. “Football is always just a reflection of what is happening in society.”

Maksimir exemplified the toxic nationalism and football hooliganism that have shadowed Vucic’s rise to dominate Serbian politics for more than a decade as prime minister from 2014 to 2017, and since then, as president.

As war raged through the former Yugoslavia, Vucic began his political career with a far-right group calling for a “Greater Serbia”. In 1995, merely days after Bosnian Serb forces perpetrated a genocide against Bosniaks, Vucic threatened to kill hundreds if outside powers intervened.

Two decades later, after founding a new, more centrist party, Vucic paid his respects to the Srebrenica victims and called the killings a “monstrous crime”. However, he has never recognised the crimes as a genocide and opposed the 2024 United Nations vote establishing an annual remembrance day. Meanwhile, he has led negotiations for Serbia to join the European Union and strengthened ties with China and Russia. Since taking the presidency in 2017, he has consolidated power and curbed democratic freedoms.

Throughout, allegations of criminality have plagued his presidency – from football thugs to graft reaching the halls of power – as anticorruption protests continue into their second year.

Amid the antigovernment protests, what motivates his grip on power, and how does he see the world today?

Red Star football fans fight each other during the Yugoslav Cup final match against Partizan in Belgrade, Serbia, on May 9, 2001 [Reuters]

Vucic was born in 1970 in Belgrade, the capital of a country that no longer exists: Yugoslavia, a vast land home to many ethnic groups spanning what is now seven nations in southeastern Europe.

Vucic’s family fled their home village of Cipuljic in central Bosnia to escape the Ustase, Croatian fascists who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. The family left after Vucic’s grandfather, a prosperous merchant, was murdered by collaborators in 1941. He’d offended them by serving a keg of rakija (a strong Balkan brandy) to passersby outside his shop in solidarity with anti-German demonstrations in Belgrade.

The Ustase sought a Greater Croatia, attempting to achieve this by throwing Serbs, Jews and Roma into death camps. A violent Serb movement, the Chetniks, organised in response, but their own ambitions of a Greater Serbia led them to massacre Bosniaks and Croats, and eventually, to collaborate with the Nazis.

But it was Josip Broz Tito’s communist, multiethnic Partisans who ultimately prevailed against the Nazi occupation.

Tito went on to lead post-war Yugoslavia, refusing to be drawn into either camp during the Cold War. Yugoslavs were much freer and enjoyed a decent standard of living compared with their neighbours behind the Iron Curtain, and could easily travel abroad, including a young Vucic, who spent a year learning English in the British seaside town of Brighton in the late 1980s. It was, nevertheless, a dictatorship, where nationalism and religion were suppressed.

After the death of Tito – who was of Croat-Slovene descent – in 1980, his vision of a multiethnic Yugoslavia began crumbling. The Yugoslav army, as well as the central government in Belgrade, became increasingly dominated by Serbs led by strongman and eventual president, Slobodan Milosevic.

It was around this time that Vucic, then in his late teens, got drawn into the football hooligan scene through his favourite team, Red Star, whose fans had a reputation as hardcore Serbian nationalists.

Vucic often brings up this past. Once, he boasted of having been in 50 fights. “Even when I was beaten up around the stadium or in the stands, I never reported it to the police. I behaved like a slobbery [rascal] who still held onto his honour,” he told a Serbian tabloid.

According to a New York Times article about Vucic’s alleged underworld ties, after one particularly heated game in 1988, the future president and his friends went “hunting” for Albanians on the streets of Belgrade and got into a fight.

“I don’t like him now, but he was brave, brave in the fight,” said a self-professed hooligan who fought alongside Vucic that day.

Branizlav Saric, 47, helps his friend Mustafa Cemalovic, 40, who has just been hit by shrapnel from a mortar shell that exploded less than 90 metres (295 feet) from the UN’s main headquarters in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on July 11, 1995, during the city’s nearly four-year siege [Enric F Marti/AP Photo]

‘Kill one Serb and we will kill 100 Muslims’

The Yugoslav wars began in 1991, when Slovenia, followed by Croatia, and then Bosnia, declared independence. Common criminals became warlords as paramilitaries, such as Arkan’s Tigers, backed by Milosevic’s government in Belgrade, committed atrocities against Bosniaks and Croats.

“Reports suggest that figures like Arkan recruited supporters directly from [football stadium] stands [into paramilitaries],” explained Sasa Dorđevic, a Serbia expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

Bosnia – with its multiethnic population of Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats – suffered the most.

From 1992 to 1995, the capital Sarajevo was besieged by Bosnian Serb forces, the longest siege in modern history, as they tried, but never succeeded, to take the city. Civilians ran for cover through the main boulevard of the city, nicknamed Sniper Alley, dodging bullets fired from nearby hillsides.

Vucic, then a law student in Belgrade, felt isolated on campus due to the political landscape – then split between Milosevic’s government and the opposition. In 1992, he volunteered with Bosnian Serb forces for 40 days behind the front lines. What he did exactly remains a matter of contention. Jovana Polic, a Serbian journalist who directed two documentaries about Vucic, said he worked at the Bosnian Serb propaganda television station Kanal S in Pale.

“He claims to have interviewed [Bosnian Serb leader] Radovan Karadzic, and even managed to play a quick game of chess with [General] Ratko Mladic,” Polic said, emphasising that both men were later convicted of war crimes.

As commander of the Bosnian Serb army, Mladic orchestrated the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica genocide.

After returning from Bosnia, Vucic, then 23, found a political home with the far-right Serbian Radical Party.

A spiritual successor to the Chetniks, the Radicals’ chief platform was a “Greater Serbia” encompassing most of the former Yugoslavia.

A video from 1995 shows Vucic visiting Serb positions in the wooded valley around Sarajevo alongside the Radicals’ leader Vojislav Seselj, often described as Vucic’s “political father,” who once said he’d scoop out Croats’ eyeballs with a rusty spoon.

In the clip, Vucic is seen carrying a long, thin object, speculated to be a rifle, which he has denied, claiming to have never fired a gun.

Vucic’s rise through the party was meteoric. In 1993, he was elected to parliament as the country’s youngest MP, and less than two years later, became the party’s general secretary.

Then, in July 1995, the worst atrocity in Europe since the second world war took place in Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia. Bosnian Serb forces rounded up and systematically murdered more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys.

Just days later, speaking before Serbia’s parliament, Vucic warned against the interference of outside powers. “If you kill one Serb, we will kill a hundred Muslims,” he said.

Nevertheless, in late 1995, following NATO bombardment against Bosnian Serb forces, the leaders of Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia agreed to end the conflict by signing the Dayton Accords.

In 1997, Serbia held elections, and the Radicals, to the extreme right of Milosevic and his followers, joined his governing coalition. The same year, Vucic married his first wife, Ksenija Jankovic, a journalist, with whom he’d have two children: a son, Danilo, and a daughter, Milica.

The former Ministry of Defence building in Belgrade remains as a memorial, its side obliterated by a NATO bomb [File: Niko Vorobyov/Al Jazeera]

Minister of wartime propaganda

But there was still the question of Kosovo: an autonomous province within Yugoslavia, formally part of Serbia but populated chiefly by ethnic Albanians.

Albanians wanted their own republic and ultimately, independence. But Kosovo, as the site of the 1389 battle between Serbs and Ottoman forces, holds immense symbolic, patriotic value in Serb national memory. In early 1998, clashes broke out between Albanian guerrillas and the Yugoslav army (now consisting of only Serbia and Montenegro).

At about this time, Vucic’s pragmatic, or perhaps opportunistic, approach became apparent. Despite publicly disparaging Milosevic in the past, Vucic accepted the post of minister of information in his government. He was 28.

Amid mounting opposition, Milosevic’s regime grew increasingly repressive, and Vucic oversaw what were, at the time, the tightest media restrictions in Europe.

Newspapers were held responsible for their interviewees’ words and could be heavily fined for printing what the government deemed untrue, effectively banning any suggestion that Serbian soldiers could have committed atrocities. Vucic took a very strict line, personally signing a letter to the newspaper, Danas, warning it’d be shut down if they didn’t cease its critical, “defeatist” tone over the Kosovo war.

“Dismissals, intimidation and arrests of journalists became everyday occurrences; some independent media outlets were shut down or taken over by the state,” explained Polic.

“Mandatory censorship was also introduced. Editors would … submit the next day’s editions to the censors for approval.”

Vucic publicly defended this position, accusing the noncompliant media of working to bring about “the destruction of Serbia as an independent and free state and … the destruction of the entire Serbian people” at the behest of the United States.

After soldiers massacred 45 Albanian villagers in the village of Racak, NATO, fearing another Bosnia-style genocide, deployed its warplanes in March 1999. Over the course of 78 days, fireballs lit up the night skies over Belgrade. About 500 civilians and more than 300 members of the armed forces were killed, according to the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre, while Vucic and others say more than 2,500 people were killed.

Vucic was sitting nearby with Seselj, playing the board game Risk, when a bomb fell on the Yugoslav army’s headquarters. The windows shook, but the players were unharmed. Vucic was one move away from winning, but Seselj took advantage of the impact to flip over the game board, denying victory to his protege.

In a news release, Vucic decried the “evil, terrible, subversive, cowardly attack by the NATO army on Serbia and Yugoslavia”.

“Serbia will defend itself against the aggressor and will defeat the enemy.”

But after two months of bombings, Milosevic capitulated, and Yugoslav troops withdrew from Kosovo, replaced by international peacekeepers.

For his services in silencing dissent, Vucic was awarded an apartment in Belgrade, but his new job wouldn’t last.

Vucic, right, of the ultranationalist Serbian Radicals is held by the secretary-general of Serbia’s governing Socialist Party, Zoran Andjelkovic, as he argues with parliament Speaker Dragan Tomic, in Belgrade, October 23, 2000 [GOT/CRB]

Rise to power

Discontent with Milosevic’s rule as a result of political repression, an economy in tatters, and defeat on the battlefield, had been brewing for a few years, but the country reached a tipping point in the 2000 elections: the federal electoral commission refused to concede that the opposition bloc won more than half the vote, amid widespread allegations of ballot-stuffing. Enraged, the opposition called for a nationwide strike.

The student-led Otpor (“Resistance”) movement protested in the streets, and even football hooligans had had enough, chanting, “Kill yourself, Slobodan!” at matches.

On October 5, a mob of protesters smashed a bulldozer through the front doors of RTS, the state-run broadcaster, before tearing the offices apart. Milosevic resigned that night.

While some celebrated the fall of Milosevic, Vucic remembered it as a very dark day.

By his own account, he was walking outside with his son when they were attacked by men high on drugs.

“I knocked them both out,” he stated in a 2003 interview.

“I went back to the house, and I knew, of course, that Serbia was going to enter years of decline and destruction.”

But the former editor of Pravda, a Serbian tabloid, once close to Vucic, claimed the future president spent that day quietly sitting at home, waiting to see what would happen next. Observers see the anecdote as bolstering a tough image.

Vucic’s party was out. The new democratically elected Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic tried to face up to Serbia’s role in the Yugoslav wars, speedily extraditing war criminals, including Milosevic.

Organised crime had flourished in the 1990s, when the government worked closely with smugglers to bypass wartime sanctions and prop up the economy. Djindjic, who tried to clean up the country from the Milosevic-era crime, was assassinated in 2003 by a gang of ex-Arkan’s Tigers (Arkan himself had already been shot dead in an underworld feud before he could face justice).

Djindjic’s centre-left Democratic Party governed Serbia for just under a decade. In this new, pro-Western Serbia, Vucic and the Radicals were back in the opposition. His “political father,” Seselj, had already been indicted in The Hague in 2003 for inciting ethnic cleansing.

During the manhunt for Hague fugitive Mladic in 2007, Vucic brought a sign to parliament reading “safe house for Ratko Mladic,” and stuck posters saying “Ratko Mladic Boulevard” along the Belgrade boulevard named after Djindjic. Vucic claimed he was “prosecuted only because he was defending his country”.

The following year, he led rallies against Radovan Karadzic’s arrest.

But by now, Vucic was realising that ultranationalism was no longer so popular, and his next steps would prove politically savvy. In September 2008, he defected from the Radicals to cofound the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), a more moderate party with aspirations of joining the EU. Observers argue he was guided by both ambition and pragmatism.

“He changed his clothes, removed Seselj from his lapel, put on a European suit and stepped into a new political chapter,” Polic explained.

He moderated his stance and highlighted how EU membership – the country formally applied in 2009 – was in the best interest of Serbia’s struggling post-war economy.

“He realised that with that radical position, you cannot get a majority in Serbia,” said Florian Bieber, professor of Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz, Austria.

“So in that sense, he moderated his position for pragmatic reasons, because it’s more important for him to come to power than to promote that particular agenda.”

But it is unclear how far his beliefs have evolved. Vucic visited Srebrenica in 2015 and acknowledged that terrible crimes took place. “[It] is a move away from where he was ideologically 20 years ago or so,” Bieber said.

He, however, has repeatedly denied that it was a genocide.

Meanwhile, as Seselj raged at Vucic’s SNS from his prison cell, calling them traitors, Vucic rose in the polls.

By appealing to moderate, Eurocentric voters while keeping their nationalist base, the SNS became the dominant party in Serbia, winning key plebiscites in 2012 and 2014.

Vucic became prime minister after the 2014 elections, and in 2017, he won the presidency.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, walks with Vucic for a meeting at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, China on September 2, 2025 [Maxim Shemetov/Pool/AFP]

Balancing act

After the isolation, sanctions and war-induced trauma of the 1990s, and the post-Milosevic rush towards privatisation that followed – deepening wealth inequality – Vucic has overseen an improvement in living standards: Since he first entered office in 2012, unemployment has fallen from 24 percent to single digits, while wages have more than doubled. Officials describe the president as a workaholic who only sleeps for three hours a night and routinely calls them at six o’clock in the morning.

“He’s incredibly intelligent, and everybody knows this about him … he’s very, very hardworking,” said Anthony Godfrey, the former US ambassador to Serbia from 2019 to 2022, who developed a close working relationship with Vucic.

A lot of the economic improvements came as a result of investment from China, which has poured billions of dollars into Serbian infrastructure through its Belt and Road Initiative. Vucic has visited China at least seven times, more than any other European leader.

“Vucic calls his relationship with China ‘the friendship made of steel’,” Godfrey told Al Jazeera.

Godfrey described Vucic, who he says is “six-foot-seven, easy,” as towering over everyone else in the room and making a “serious impression,” as well as being a skilled diplomat.

“He’s very respectful and humble when he meets with visitors. He’s a good host when people come to visit, and he genuinely wants to see what benefit a relationship can provide for Serbia.”

The president and the ambassador connected over their shared interests.

“One of his hobbies, or actually a passion I would say, is the study of wine. He’s an oenophile, and he’s got a collection of very fine wines … Serbia now produces good wine, and a lot of that is his passion coming through.”

Meanwhile, the ambassador added, Vucic has openly provided armaments to Ukraine, staving off criticism from the West over undemocratic practices. At the same time, he has refused to sanction Russia, asserting that “85 percent of Serbians will always side with Russia, whatever happens.”

Russophilia is common in Serbia, dating back to the 19th century when Russia, a fellow Slavic Orthodox nation, supported Serbia’s independence from the Ottoman Empire. More recently, the two countries share a suspicion of NATO and the West.

“He’s been trying to balance these competing global powers, which, of course, requires some level of skill considering the kind of global competition,” Bieber said.

But he also pointed to Vucic’s strategy of dodging EU demands that could threaten his hold on power. For instance, late last year, the EU expressed concern that a proposed judicial overhaul may undermine the rule of law and corruption investigations, at a time when prosecutors were probing high-ranking officials’ dealings with organised crime.

“When a country is a candidate for EU membership, as Serbia is, we expect it to behave in a European manner,” said EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos. “This is a serious step backwards.”

“It was said that Vucic must not sign, that Brussels ordered him not to. Someone ordering me? Anyone who thinks that is possible is not normal. I will listen to everyone, but I make the decisions,” the president fired back as he signed the proposal into law this year.

Vucic is welcomed by European Council President Antonio Costa in Brussels, Belgium, on November 4, 2025 [Yves Herman/Reuters]

Vucic has to maintain a delicate balance at home, too. While he may have once held together a big tent of Europhiles and nationalists, according to Godfrey, the president has come to rely on the latter, including Serbs living in Kosovo or Bosnia who are eligible to vote in Serbian elections.

“They are going to vote for Vucic, provided he still sings the right nationalist song,” Godfrey explained.

“So as long as he keeps saying ‘NATO bad, Kosovo is Serbia,’ things like that, the people on the right will continue to vote for him.

“But it’s pushing him to become even more extremist the more dependent he is on these votes.”

This doesn’t mean Vucic is a serious nationalist so much as an opportunist, according to Polic.

“When he is speaking to the West, he is a reformist who strives for peace. When he is speaking to his voters, he is a warrior, defending every inch of the land,” she said. “In reality, Kosovo is his political currency with which he pays for his survival on the throne.”

Vucic has not recognised Kosovo’s 2008 declared independence, which Godfrey said would be extremely politically “costly”.

But some believe Vucic’s nationalist fervour is still very real.

Milos Injac, a local government representative for the Green-Left Front in Belgrade, considers figures like Seselj as useful stand-ins for Vucic’s real beliefs, which he says haven’t changed since the 1990s. Since his release from a Dutch prison in 2014, Seselj has become a public supporter of Vucic.

“I think he’s exactly the same as he was, but for the sake of looking normal and not having Europe breathing down his neck, he has his own goons that will say what he doesn’t want to say,” Injac said.

Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped public disillusionment with Vucic, culminating in mass anticorruption protests since 2024 that threaten his grip on power.

A placard with a photo of Vucic is held as students and antigovernment demonstrators take part in a protest in Belgrade on March 15, 2025. The protests became a national movement for change following the deadly November 2024 Novi Sad railway station roof collapse [Djordje Kojadinovic/Reuters]

The drop that spilled the glass

In November 2024, the concrete canopy of the railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, collapsed onto the pavement, killing 16 people.

Mass protests broke out – first in Novi Sad, then nationwide – against what was perceived to be a corrupt construction process, becoming a rallying cry for discontent with the government.

“Every government since the 1990s has tried to make politics something dirty, and as the elections come up, less and less people were voting,’” Injac, a veteran of protests over the past 10 years, observed.

“But what happened in Novi Sad made people realise that it doesn’t matter how much you don’t care about politics, your child could have been underneath that thing … This was like the drop that spilled the glass.”

Police used tear gas and pepper spray to disperse crowds, which shattered the windows of government buildings and threw eggs, bottles and bricks. Protest leaders said masked rioters were agent provocateurs. But the protests continued to swell.

The protests have led to resignations, including that of Serbia’s prime minister and Novi Sad’s mayor early last year.

Vucic has tried to placate the protesters by issuing pardons for 13 detained demonstrators. Meanwhile, 13 other individuals were arrested on corruption charges related to the catastrophe, including two former ministers. But Vucic has also publicly implied that the canopy catastrophe was deliberately orchestrated to stir up the opposition.

The protesters, unsatisfied, dug in, pitching tents on the road in front of the National Assembly. A separate camp of SNS supporters settled on the opposite side of the fence, acting as a buffer between the protests and the parliament.

The Serbian investigative outlet KRIK identified several individuals at the pro-government camp as prominent football hooligans and other criminals, including a burly one-eyed ex-convict named Petar Panic, a decades-long personal friend of Vucic.

According to Dordevic, the crime expert, Serbian football thugs provide muscle for organised crime as well as “rent-a-mobs” for politicians, including to stir up police trouble or attack protesters.

He and Bieber say the same tactics apply now.

Vucic arrives at parliament to attend an oath ceremony for the newly elected government in Belgrade on April 16, 2025, after months of student-led anticorruption protests brought down the previous administration [Oliver Bunic/AFP]

‘Desire to be in control’

As protests continue, Vucic maintains a grip on power, including through the media. The majority of newspapers and TV stations are controlled by his allies, but independent media still exists in Serbia. Still, non-state-aligned journalists are threatened, harassed and occasionally assaulted, while oppositionists are smeared.

“If [the opposition] are talked about, they’re slandered,” said Bieber. “They’re called scum, foreign traitors, collaborators with external powers.”

“[Vucic] does not use the media — he owns them,” added Polic.

“He orders ‘exclusives’, makes targets out of people, with a standard dose of state paranoia. Criticism of him or the regime is translated into this machinery as treason, and any suspicion as hatred towards Serbia.”

After the broadcast of her documentary about Vucic, “The Ruler”, on Serbian television, for example, Vucic’s lawyers presented Polic with a lawsuit in 2023. There was an outcry, and Vucic announced on Instagram that he was withdrawing the lawsuit, which he claimed was filed behind his back.

The ongoing protest movement is demanding early elections before Vucic is officially due to step down in 2027. The president has agreed, but no date has been set for a vote.

“If this lasts longer, he knows that in the long term, he will win,” Injac said.

“People get tired … [they] have their jobs, their families, their own concerns. They don’t have time to stand in the streets all day … [But Vucic] knows that he’s sitting on a barrel of gunpowder that can explode any second.”

Why won’t Vucic step aside?

“‘I am the state’ has been his motto for over a decade,” Polic said, comparing the president with the 18th-century French King Louis XIV, who reigned as an absolute monarch.

“He turned Serbia into a personal possession … He captured the state, occupied institutions, killed democracy, threatened human rights, trampled on the media, collapsed society.”

“He portrays himself as a martyr, as somebody who is sacrificing his time and energy for the country,” Bieber said. “But I think this desire to be in control really is a driving force for him.”

Ambassador Godfrey pointed to Vucic’s thinking that he alone can do what’s best for Serbia.

“Vucic wants to raise the living standard in Serbia, wants to invest in the infrastructure, wants to do all these things, but he thinks, in my view, that the only person who can do this is him.

“And therefore, it’s very important for him to stay and to continue doing these things.”