Brnabic or Macut: Who Is Vucic's Presidential Candidate?

Dragan Djilas, the opposition leader, has claimed that Aleksandar Vucic has two most likely candidates for the presidential elections: sitting Prime Minister Djuro Macut and Speaker of the National Assembly Ana Brnabic. The claim landed at the moment when the question of who stays in the presidential seat stopped being theoretical. On July 14, Vucic announced that he would return to the post of prime minister after the elections, which put the head of state’s office into the electoral cycle as an open item.

The Serbian Progressive Party has not responded. The party leadership has confirmed no name, has not denied Djilas, and has produced no shortlist. What exists today is a claim by an opposition politician, plus assessments from analysts who read it with reservations.

Why Macut and Brnabic are the names in circulation

The logic behind those two names is institutional rather than electoral. Djuro Macut is the prime minister and therefore formally the most politically responsible figure in the country, the man who runs the government and signs off on its decisions. Ana Brnabic is Speaker of the Assembly and has for years been Vucic’s closest and most loyal associate, with a longer run at the top than most of the people mentioned in the corridors.

Analyst Nikola Parun argues that this is still not enough. In his assessment, Brnabic and Macut are not the SNS first choice, but they could become it if candidates with better ratings refuse to run. Put differently, their names are a fallback that activates only once a stronger option says no. That is a meaningful difference from Djilas’s framing, which presents them as Vucic’s pick.

Parun goes a step further and says that both are people who bring no added value with voters beyond what their closeness to Vucic gives them. The judgment is blunt and it goes to the heart of a candidacy: a candidate who does not bring a vote of their own is not a candidate but a conduit for someone else’s.

What is a candidate without a rating actually worth?

Parun’s assessment implies that the outcome of the presidential election depends above all on Vucic’s personal rating and influence, not on whose name appears on the ballot for his party. If that holds, picking a candidate is not a strategic question for SNS but a technical one, and it comes down to a single criterion: loyalty. A candidate who is loyal but has no base of their own cannot become a rival to the person who put them there.

That calculation cuts both ways. A candidate without weight of their own also cannot absorb a fall, so any erosion of support lands directly on the account of the man whose face stands behind the candidacy. A fallback protects against internal competition. It does not protect against the result.

It is worth restating where things stand. Djilas made a claim. Parun offered an analysis. SNS has said nothing. Until there is an official candidacy, everything else is an estimate rather than a decision, and it should be read that way.

Can a candidate with no rating of their own win a presidential election at all, or does it all come down to the man standing behind them?