Aleksandar Vučić
Aleksandar Vučić has been president of Serbia since 2017 and was its prime minister from 2014 to 2017, the man who has run the country since 2012 by whichever office he holds, the Radical Party's information minister under Milošević in 1998-2000, who wrote the law that fined newspapers into silence and said in the Bosnian parliament in 1995 that for every Serb killed a hundred Muslims would die. In 2008 he left the Radicals with Nikolić to found the Progressive Party as a pro-European conservative party. It won in 2012 and has won every election since by margins that grow. The years have been the Brussels agreement of 2013 with Kosovo, the EU candidacy and the chapters that do not close. There were the German car-parts factories and the Chinese steel mill at Smederevo and copper mine at Bor, the Belgrade Waterfront built with Emirati money on land cleared by masked men at night. There was the refusal to sanction Russia after 2022 while selling ammunition that reached Ukraine. There is the lithium mine at Jadar that Rio Tinto wants and the villages do not, and the television stations that show him for hours. There was the collapse of the railway station canopy at Novi Sad on 1 November 2024 that killed sixteen and brought the students out for a year, the largest protests in the country's history, which he has so far outlasted. He was born in Belgrade in 1970, studied law there, spent a year in Brighton, and joined Šešelj's Radicals at twenty-three, becoming their secretary-general at twenty-five. The conversion of 2008, from Greater Serbia to Europe, he has explained as growing up, and his opponents as calculation. As prime minister he took the IMF's programme, cut pensions and public pay, and balanced the budget, which the ratings agencies liked. As president he has made the office the government, with prime ministers who serve at his word, including a lesbian technocrat and a gynaecologist, and a party that has absorbed the state. The election of December 2023 was found by observers to have been won with imported voters in Belgrade, and the students of 2024-25 asked for nothing but that the law be applied, which was the most dangerous demand. He has offered early elections and not held them. He says the West is trying to overthrow him, which is what Milošević said.
- Lived: 1970 CE – ?
- Nationality: Serbian
- Roles: president, prime minister, politician
