For more than a year, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has evaded early elections, despite unprecedented student protests, public frustration, and mounting political pressure. Instead of responding to the demands of tens of thousands of citizens, he has tightened his grip on power using every available institutional and media lever to safeguard his rule.
Experts agree: Vučić did not survive this year because of democratic strength, but because he has engineered a political environment in which accountability is nearly impossible.
Legitimacy Built on Fear, Not Consensus
Lawyer Sead Spahović is blunt: Vučić’s survival has little to do with popular trust.
Instead, it rests on:
- a controlled version of “legitimacy” upheld by state institutions,
- a fragmented opposition, weakened in part by a student movement strategically isolated from it,
- and the simple fact that no one but Vučić can call early elections.
The president has used this constitutional advantage to its full extent, dragging out the political crisis while projecting an image of authority. Student protests, no matter how massive, could not threaten a leader who refuses to recognize their demands.
Spahović adds another uncomfortable truth: Serbia lacks a real ideological alternative because so many political actors remain trapped in the same pro-Russian, anti-Western mindset that Vučić exploits.
Ten Years of Media Capture
Retired professor Žarko Korać emphasizes a decade-long operation of media consolidation under Vučić’s control.
He describes a synchronized propaganda machine in which identical narratives are pushed across outlets from tabloids to the public broadcaster ensuring that criticism is either silenced or aggressively attacked.
Korać recalls moments when nine different outlets published the same smear article against him at the exact same time. This kind of centrally coordinated message discipline is not political competitiveness it is information control.
Even the massive student protests, though organized and persistent, were neutralized by this environment. Vučić’s media framed protesters as chaos-seekers, foreign agents, or naïve idealists never as legitimate political forces.
It worked.
Serbia’s Unfinished Break from the Past
Korać argues that Serbia’s deeper problem is that it never truly broke with the political doctrines of the 1990s.
Vučić and many of his closest allies built their careers under Slobodan Milošević, and the country has repeatedly shown its unwillingness to reject that legacy. The result is a state where structures of power remain resilient to change, regardless of protests or elections.
Captured Institutions, Economic Dependence, and Manufactured Fear
Lawyer Vladimir Terzić points to a trio of mechanisms that have cemented Vučić’s rule:
- Total political domination through institutional and media capture, which blocks any narrative not approved by the government.
- A system of economic dependency, where jobs, contracts, and welfare are tied to loyalty to the ruling party.
- A sustained atmosphere of fear, maintained by constant references to external enemies—Ustashas, Albanians, Western governments, even Russians when convenient.
The message is always the same: Only Vučić can keep Serbia “stable.”
Terzić also highlights the involvement of criminal structures mobilized during elections to secure votes and intimidate opponents along with the use of off-the-books funding to buy political loyalty.
A System Designed to Prevent Change
The experts agree: Vučić’s survival is not a democratic success.
It is the result of an ecosystem deliberately built to prevent political turnover through intimidation, propaganda, dependency, and fear.
As long as these mechanisms remain in place, Serbia’s path to genuine political change will remain extraordinarily narrow, and almost entirely blocked.
