Stefanovic resurfaces at SNS Main Board meeting

Nebojsa Stefanovic, once Serbia’s interior minister and later its defense minister, was in the hall of the MTS Arena in Belgrade on July 31 for an expanded session of the Main Board of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Party president Milos Vucevic chaired the meeting. For a man who had all but vanished from party and public life after 2022, it was the first gathering of that rank in a long stretch of months.

His attendance was not announced. It surfaced in a photograph published after the session by SNS lawmaker Nebojsa Bakarec, and that photograph alone put the question of his return back into circulation.

Vucevic posted a short note about the meeting afterwards.

In a packed hall of the MTS Arena we held a meeting of the expanded Main Board of the Serbian Progressive Party.

Stefanovic went unmentioned in it. The former minister’s name came back through a shot of the audience, not from the podium.

Eight years at the top, then four years of silence

Stefanovic served as speaker of the National Assembly from 2012 to 2014. He then spent eight uninterrupted years in government:

• six years running the Interior Ministry (MUP), from 2014 to 2020
• two years running the Defense Ministry, from 2020 to 2022
• he took the defense portfolio in a swap with Aleksandar Vulin, who moved to the police in the same reshuffle

After the 2022 elections he was pushed out of the party leadership and off every public post. He has appeared in the media rarely since, with no party role and no outing that could be described as political.

Why did Stefanovic disappear from the front row?

The break came in 2021. That May, SNS boards across Serbia declared themselves in favor of removing him as head of the party’s Belgrade City Board and from public office. He did not resign, and the pressure from the party base ended without any formal outcome. The ground he had held began to narrow from that point on.

The same year, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic stated publicly that he had been under surveillance. Questions about the then defense minister’s responsibility followed in the press, and Stefanovic’s withdrawal has been tied to that affair ever since. No proceedings were ever brought against him over it.

Krusik and claims that never reached a conclusion

In late 2018, reports alleged that Stefanovic’s father had brokered arms sales from the Krusik plant in Kragujevac to buyers in Saudi Arabia. The allegations ran in investigative outlets at the time and Stefanovic rejected them.

Milivoje Katnic, a former Montenegrin prosecutor, later claimed that the split between the Skaljari and Kavac clans came about when, as he put it, Vucic and Stefanovic fell out. That claim was never established in any proceeding.

The sum of these affairs is political rather than legal. Stefanovic was neither charged nor convicted, yet he ended up with no place at all in the machine he had helped build over eight years.

What the appearance means, and what it does not

A photograph from a session is neither an office nor a mandate. The expanded Main Board is the party’s widest forum, and the room holds far more people than any body that actually decides anything. Showing up in that format is the cheapest possible return: visible enough to register, non binding enough to require no explanation.

The arithmetic is still plain. Five years and two months separate the May 2021 revolt against him from the July 31 session. Four years separate the 2022 elections from this meeting, four years without a single office. For someone who spent eight years in government, this is the first time he has been in the same room as the party leadership.

SNS has offered no explanation and Stefanovic has said nothing about his attendance. The next test will be concrete and easy to verify: whether his name turns up in the party’s official materials and bodies, or stays where it is now, in a photograph of the audience.