SNS says Vucic has not decided on prime minister bid
On day three of the no-confidence debate, opposition MPs asked who will run the government after the election, and the ruling party's caucus chief replied that the president has yet to make up his mind.
The third day of Serbia’s no-confidence debate, on Wednesday, July 29, moved off the government’s record and onto a question the chamber had not put directly before: whether Aleksandar Vucic will stand as the candidate for prime minister at the next parliamentary election. It came from the opposition benches, and the answer came from Milenko Jovanov, caucus chief of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), who said the decision has not been taken.
Dobrica Veselinovic of the Green-Left Front framed it by listing the offices Vucic has held so far: information minister, deputy prime minister, prime minister, and, for the past ten years, president of Serbia. “We are talking here about decades of rule by one and the same side,” Veselinovic said, before asking whether voters want more of the same or new people with new ideas.
“Do we want to have a ruler who rules for decades again?” he asked, closing that part of his remarks.
Has Vucic decided to run for prime minister?
Jovanov answered in two moves. He first pointed to the constitutional limit of two terms for the president, then rejected what he called years of opposition claims that the ruling parties intended to amend the constitution so Vucic could seek a third presidential term. Only then did he turn to the prime minister question, and he said it is still open.
“He will decide that first, and then the people will decide,” Jovanov said from his seat in the chamber.
The wording is careful. It does not rule out Vucic leading the executive after the election; it defers confirmation to two separate points, the president’s own choice and the ballot.
What the president himself said three days earlier
That is where the exchange in the chamber runs into something already on the record. In remarks we covered on July 26, Vucic laid out the sequence of the coming election cycle and said he would resign the presidency in order to run for prime minister, estimating a parliamentary vote in October or November and a presidential race between late December and early February. The detail is in Vucic sets election timeline: presidential vote by February.
The gap between that statement and Wednesday’s answer is not trivial. The president spoke of intent; his caucus speaks of an unsettled question. For a campaign that has not formally started, that leaves the ruling coalition free to name its list leader and its candidate for prime minister on its own schedule rather than when the opposition demands it.
Coalition replies and a turn to health policy
Dunja Simonovic Bratic of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) predicted that the current parliamentary opposition will not hold seats in the National Assembly after the next election. She also defended the appointment of Djuro Macut as prime minister, describing it as a necessary step after the Novi Sad railway station disaster.
The debate then returned to individual portfolios. Dragan Delic of the Serbia Centre party attacked the government’s health policy, the state of preventive medicine and the pharmaceutical system, and grounded the criticism in mortality data.
“85 percent of deaths in Serbia are linked to chronic, non-communicable diseases, which are more or less preventable.”
Delic used the figure to argue that a share of each doctor’s daily appointments should be reserved for preventive work, and listed problems in the system he considers unresolved.
What comes next
The session continues, and the vote is the last formal step. The arithmetic in the chamber leaves little doubt about the outcome, which is why the real stake of this debate has shifted to the campaign ahead. The question of who will be the candidate for prime minister has moved from corridor talk into the parliamentary record, and it will keep being asked until the ruling party supplies a name.
