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Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic has resigned to contest October snap elections as he seeks to become prime minister. Vucic announced his resignation on Sunday, during a speech at the presidential palace in Belgrade.
Supporters gathered outside the palace, chanting his name as he announced that he would hand over his duties to parliament speaker Ana Brnabic.
“I am resigning as president. Tomorrow morning I will hand over my duties to the parliament speaker,” Vucic said.
The resignation comes after nearly two years of student-led protests calling for snap elections and greater government accountability. The protests began after a canopy collapsed at a railway station in Novi Sad in November 2024, killing 16 people.
The tragedy prompted some of Serbia’s largest protests since the fall of former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, with demonstrations at times drawing hundreds of thousands of people.
Initially, people demanded a transparent investigation into the collapse, but the movement later expanded to include calls for snap elections.
Vucic had repeatedly promised an early vote without announcing a date, before calling the October 25 election earlier this month. He said the decision followed “major turbulence on the domestic political scene”.
Vucic, who was first elected president in 2017 and re-elected in May 2022, has now cut short his five-year term to campaign for prime minister. Although the law did not require him to resign, he said he wanted to contest the election “as an ordinary man, as one of the people”.
Vucic now heads the electoral list of his Serbian Progressive Party and is its candidate for prime minister.
Minutes before resigning, he also used his constitutional powers to pardon 49 people, including students and members of his party, who were suspected of offences linked to the protests.
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“I have decided to pardon 49 people, 23 of them in connection with the terrible events we have gone through over the past year and a half,” Vucic said.
Under Serbia’s constitution, Brnabic will now serve as acting president for up to three months. During that period, a presidential election must be called.
The October snap election will therefore take place against the backdrop of prolonged protests, political tensions and demands for greater accountability from the government.
