Aleksandar Vučić

Biography

Aleksandar Vučić was born in Belgrade in 1970 and trained as a lawyer at the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Law. He entered politics in 1993 with the far-right Serbian Radical Party, sat in the National Assembly, and became the party's secretary-general in 1995. From 1998 until Slobodan Milošević's fall in 2000 he was minister of information, a period remembered for restrictive measures against journalists and foreign broadcasters.

In 2008 he and Tomislav Nikolić broke away from the Radicals to found the Serbian Progressive Party. After the party came first in the 2012 election, Vučić became first deputy prime minister and defence minister and took over the party leadership, which he held until 2023. He was a central figure in the EU-brokered dialogue with Kosovo that produced the 2013 Brussels Agreement.

Vučić served as prime minister from 2014 to 2017, pursuing EU accession talks, privatisation and economic liberalisation, and was elected president in 2017 and re-elected in 2022. As president he launched the Open Balkan initiative and signed the 2020 economic normalisation agreement with Kosovo in Washington, while keeping close ties with Russia and China. Critics describe his rule as increasingly authoritarian, pointing to pressure on the media and civil liberties. In 2026 he resigned the presidency to run for prime minister in that year's parliamentary election.