Like loyal papers everywhere when their leader takes the podium in New York, Informer, a tabloid close to Serbia's government, reported that the whole world had been waiting for Aleksandar Vučić's address to the UN General Assembly last week. It was his last appearance on the international stage as Serbia's president, since he would step down that Sunday to lead his party into the snap parliamentary elections of 25 October as its candidate for prime minister. A General Assembly speech is never really addressed to the room, only to the audience back home, dressed up with a grander backdrop than usual. Vučić's version, likewise, was aimed at an audience several thousand kilometres away.
"The international system as we knew it has collapsed," he told the hall. "It no longer exists." In its place, he said, is "a new order increasingly structured around two principal centres of power." With the US and China plainly in mind, the now ex-president painted a picture of international disorder in which the room for manoeuvre for small states keeps shrinking while the pressure to choose a side keeps rising. In the same breath, he cast Serbia's EU bid as compatible with keeping every door open, telling the assembly that joining the EU does not mean "renouncing the traditional friendship thanks to which Belgrade is one of the few European capitals from which one can fly directly to the United States of America, the People's Republic of China, and the Russian Federation."
Serbia's openness, he said, "reflects our development strategy, our history, and our understanding of the world." A state can have interests and a course of its own, he argued, without closing the door to those it disagrees with. Presumably, since a world of like-minded interlocutors would have little need for diplomacy.
At the upcoming elections, Vučić will face the Student List, a movement that has gathered mass over nearly two years of blockades and protests since the canopy collapse in Novi Sad. Its amorphous shape, worn as a badge of honour by a movement that insists it has no leader, will have to survive a politics increasingly centred on strong, confident personalities and capable operators. The country he has run may well be weighed down by public frustration over perceived corruption, rising living costs and more than a decade of SNS rule.
"But for a man like Vučić, there is no problem a phone call can't solve."
Andraž Tavčar, executive editor of The Adriatic
In August, while inspecting roadworks near Paraćin, Vučić was approached by the mother of a boy with Niemann-Pick's disease. In front of the cameras, he rang the director of Serbia's national health insurance fund and pressed her to hurry the treatment along, for this boy and for another child whose father had approached him a few days earlier. "Just don't harass me with those bureaucratic procedures," he told her. The medicine, he assured everyone listening, would arrive within seven to ten days, not two months.
I lament the missed photo opportunity with Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, who was something of a star in his own right last week, receiving Donald Trump (along with Lula da Silva, who swapped football jerseys with him, and Pedro Sánchez, who filmed a reel with him lobbing paper balls into a bin) at Gracie Mansion as the world's leaders poured into his city. The likeness might have irked his admirers on the left, since the mayor, too, has cultivated a rather successful image as the one operator who can get a pothole filled, not by virtue of functioning city services but because he is only a phone call or an Instagram reel away.
More than a decade at the top, he can still present himself as the fixer who steps in when the state gets in the way. And the move to the premiership only sharpens the pitch. It may be a winning bet.
But it rests on a model of governance, at home and abroad, in which a great deal depends on Vučić personally picking up the phone.
Three days after his speech, he called Vladimir Putin to lock in Russian gas at 318 euros per 1,000 cubic metres for another stretch, against 868 euros on the European market. A call he needed before the deal's annex ran out on 30 September. And one only he could place.