Playing with Dates: Why Vucic Keeps Shifting the Election

The man ahead of me in the post office queue asked the clerk, in all seriousness, whether she knew when the election would be. Not because he thought she would know, but because nobody knows anymore, so you may as well ask anyone. She shrugged and said: “Whenever he says.” That “he” needed no further explanation. A whole political season fits inside those two words and one shrug.

Aleksandar Vucic has once again moved the hand of the clock. On RTS he said the vote could take place between late September and mid November. Before that he mentioned 12 July, then the end of the year, then St Vitus Day as a possible symbolic frame. Each time the headline changes, the substance stays the same: the date is in his hand, and there it remains for as long as he wants.

Why move the date when the legal deadline is years away?

The answer is not in the calendar. The legal deadline for a regular parliamentary election is December 2027, with a final cutoff in March 2028. Formally, then, there is no rush at all. When a government that does not have to call elections spends months auctioning the date, the date stops being a technical matter and becomes a message. The message reads: I decide when your time begins.

Ivana Jaksic, a lecturer at the Faculty of Political Sciences, does not read the delay as hesitation but as a form of signalling power. Whoever holds the date holds the tempo of everyone else, the opposition plans into a void, the media speculate, citizens wait. It is a classic clientelist move scaled up to the level of the state, where uncertainty is not endured but produced and handed out as a resource.

The population has to be left with the impression that you are in command of the situation

That is how Jaksic sums up the logic of delay, and Vucic said the same thing more bluntly: “They do not call elections, I call elections.” There is not a trace of doubt in that sentence. There is only a demonstration, said out loud, that the date is personal property rather than a community procedure.

What if voters read it as weakness?

This is where the risk begins for the author of the strategy himself. Controlling the discourse works only as long as the audience believes that force stands behind it. The moment a soft voter, the one who is neither firmly for nor firmly against, begins to read the constant shifting as avoidance, the message inverts. At that point the auctioning of dates looks less like strength and more like postponing a reckoning.

The numbers suggest the ground is moving. The BIRODI survey from May 2026 shows that 22.3 percent of citizens support a change of government even outside elections. That is not a marginal figure. It is nearly one in four respondents who have stopped seeing the electoral process as the only legitimate route to change. Asked who bears responsibility for the crisis, respondents pointed, in order, to:

• President Vucic
• the ruling parties
• the Government of Serbia
• the National Assembly

When that many people come to believe the ballot box is no longer decisive, every new shift of the date does not soothe but further undermines trust in the process itself. Erosion does not start on election day. It starts much earlier, with every postponed “maybe”.

I go back to that man in the post office queue. He was not angry, he was tired. And fatigue is more dangerous than anger, because it does not protest, it simply stops believing. The question that remains is not when the election will be, but what happens to a country in which the timing of a vote becomes one man’s private affair. Do you still believe that your vote, whenever it is finally counted, will decide anything?