Vucic Launches Campaign Blitz With Portal, Attacks Students
Ahead of the vote, President Aleksandar Vucic launched an anti-corruption portal, promised payments to citizens and branded the student movement as parasites.
- President Aleksandar Vucic launched an anti-corruption portal and claims it has already received about 10,000 reports.
- He promised payments to citizens and subsidies for the diaspora, saying he would run his campaign in his own car.
- He called the student movement parasites feeding at the state trough and a pack with no idea, plan or program.
- He said that if his party loses, he will immediately declare that the worst have come to power.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has opened his campaign offensive on several fronts at once. Ahead of the elections, the leader of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) unveiled an anti-corruption portal, promised new payments to citizens and described the protest movement in his harshest language yet.
The messages came over the weekend, in a series of appearances in which Vucic combined the institutional theme of fighting corruption, social promises and a head-on clash with the protest movement. The president said that around 10,000 reports had already arrived through the new portal, presenting it as a channel for citizens to flag suspected abuses directly.
Portal, Cash and a Car as a Message
Alongside the portal, Vucic announced payments to citizens and subsidies for the diaspora, a move that regularly surfaces as a governing trump card during election cycles. He did not spell out the sums in the same address, but he said he would run his campaign in his own car, a gesture meant to signal modesty and closeness to voters.
The sharpest part of his appearance targeted the student movement, which has held the streets for months. The president called its members parasites feeding at the state trough and a pack with no idea, plan or program. These are tougher labels than before, through which the government is trying to portray the protest as a hollow political project rather than a spontaneous civic reaction.
Vucic went a step further in describing the possible outcome. He said that if SNS loses the election, that very evening he would declare that the worst had come to power and that he would, in his words, mock them the whole time. Such a statement, which frames defeat in advance as a catastrophe, is part of a familiar pattern in which the ballot is turned into a fateful choice between two extremes.
What Does the Offensive Reveal About the Strategy?
Marketing experts read Vucic’s moves as a propaganda catch-all strategy, an attempt to capture the widest possible electorate with a single push. The anti-corruption portal targets disillusioned voters who want a reckoning with abuses, the payments reach socially vulnerable groups, and the attacks on students mobilize the hard core of supporters who see the protest as a threat.
The opposition and part of the protest movement read these moves as an attempt to divert attention from the demonstrators’ demands and as a fusion of state resources with the party, while the government insists it is responding to real problems and protecting institutions from what it calls a politically instrumentalized street. The gap in how the same set of moves is interpreted shows how divided the pre-election space already is.
What remains open is whether this offensive shifts the balance of power or merely hardens the camps already formed. The portal, the money and the harsh rhetoric look like three separate tools, but they point toward the same goal, controlling the election narrative up to polling day. Does the mix of anti-corruption rhetoric, social payments and attacks on students strike you as a genuine turn or a calculated campaign?
