Vucic to Launch Campaign Saturday, Quit After New York
President Vucic says he will begin a trial run of his campaign Saturday at markets and shops, then travel to New York for the UN General Assembly, and resign as president upon his return.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said on September 17, in an interview with Informer television, that he will begin a trial run of his election campaign on Saturday morning, touring markets and shops across the country. He said he will travel to New York on Monday or Tuesday for the United Nations General Assembly, and announced that he will resign as president immediately after returning from that trip.
In the same appearance, he accused the student movement of pressuring political parties not to take part in the elections called for October 25, and praised several opposition leaders whom, he said, had decided not to back down under that pressure.
Third announced resignation date
This is not the first time the president has specified when he plans to leave office. Srpske Novine had earlier reported his statement that he would resign on September 27. That date has now been replaced with a conditional formulation: the resignation comes “upon return” from New York, with no exact day given. The UN General Assembly session runs through late September, so by the president’s own timeline, his return should fall in the last week of that month.
Vucic also laid out the sequence awaiting him until then: Saturday at markets and shops, talking with citizens as a trial run for the campaign, then the trip to New York, and only after that, the resignation.
“I’m glad to see there are opposition parties, whose leaders I think very little of, who still have some courage, some personal dignity, and who won’t let certain people ban them from running just because those people think they were chosen by God, because they think a totalitarian ideology should be allowed to run an entire society in which no one is permitted to tell them anything different,” Vucic told Informer television.
He added that, in his view, many people had risen in his estimation simply by deciding not to be, as he put it, cowards, and not to shy away from the election.
Criticism of the Student List
The president devoted a separate part of the interview to the Student List, whose lead candidate is Ilija Srdanovic. Vucic claimed the list has no workers, no farmers, and no students on it, aside from, as he said, those who led the protests at universities.
Not even their top candidate is younger than me. The Student List has no workers, no farmers, no students, except for those who staged revolutions at the universities.
He also said the students behind the blockades, in his assessment, have no clear position on Republika Srpska or Kosovo, and that he considers it wrong for people without a concrete program to be deciding those questions.
For his own campaign, he promised a different tone than before. He said he intends to run what he called a positive campaign, one focused on presenting plans rather than attacking political opponents. He described Saturday’s tour of markets and shops as the first test of that approach ahead of the official start of the race.
On the resignation itself, which he has now announced for the third time since first raising it, he said the following:
When I get back, to make all of them happy, I’ll submit my resignation.
With those words, he repeated that his departure from office is not the result of street pressure or the election, but, as he maintains, his own decision.
No response from the opposition or students
Neither the student movement nor the opposition parties the president named had, as of publication, formally responded to his claims that they were being pressured not to run in the election. Ilija Srdanovic had earlier said, regarding media coverage of him, that he did not want to take part in what he called a “mud pit,” but that comment was not made in response to the president’s latest remarks.
Later in the same interview, Vucic also spoke about cooperation with Israel on drone production and what he called the building of a digital army, in connection with the opening of a factory to assemble Israeli-made drones. That part of the conversation was not tied to the election, but it confirms that the interview, alongside the campaign and resignation announcement, also touched on defense industry matters.
The timeline the president has now set out, markets on Saturday, then New York, then resignation upon return, marks the third time the date of his departure from office has shifted since he first raised it. Whether the sequence holds this time will become clear in the coming weeks, first on Saturday morning, and then on the day the president returns from the UN General Assembly session.
