The president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, dissolved the country’s Parliament this Wednesday and called early legislative elections for December 17. “We live in times when it is essential that we are all united in the fight for the preservation of Serbia’s vital national and state interests,” Vucic commented after announcing the official call for the elections in a statement published by the Serbian agency Tanjug.
Vucic had already advanced the date of the new parliamentary elections to the end of September, which will coincide with the local elections in 65 municipalities, including Belgrade. The dissolution of Parliament takes place a day after the president of the European Commission (EC), Ursula von der Leyen, met in the Serbian capital with Vucic and urged him to take concrete steps to facilitate the normalization of relations with Kosovo, former Serbian province that Belgrade does not recognize.
In the note of the electoral call, Vucic alerts the population that his country will have to endure “many pressures in the near future, both due to our attitude towards Kosovo and other regional and global issues.”
The EU and the US insist that Serbia and Kosovo normalize their relations within the framework of a dialogue promoted by Brussels and that Belgrade adopt sanctions against Russia. The legislative elections are brought forward more than two years, since the regular term of the current legislature was going to end in the spring of 2026.
In the last elections, held in April 2022 along with the presidential elections, Vucic and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) managed to be re-elected despite suffering a significant drop in their results. The pro-Western opposition has formed a bloc to confront the SNS and Vucic, who has been in power for more than a decade, and whom they accuse of exercising autocratic control of institutions and the media.