Serbia’s former president and now prime ministerial candidate (again) Aleksandar Vučić rose to prominence in the 1990s as a radical nationalist, who supported the policies of Serbian expansion and ethnic cleansing led by Slobodan Milošević, who died of a heart attack in detention in The Hague during his trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity committed in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
He served as Milošević’s information minister throughout the Kosovo conflict. His Serbian Progressive Party, or SNS, has been in government since 2012.
He first spent three years as the prime minister from 2014, before switching to the role of the president in 2017. Unable to run for the third term, he resigned from the post in September, and now wants to lead the government again.
As president, Vučić has not emulated his predecessor’s militarism, but he has maintained his nationalist playbook in domestic politics, dismissing the opposition as stooges of unspecified foreign powers.
He maintains close ties with Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China, which regularly gets him criticism from the EU and complicates Serbia’s path to the bloc.
Serbia has regressed in international rankings for press freedom and corruption in recent years, and its process of joining the EU is effectively stalled. More on that shortly.
Vučić is also fairly close with Donald Trump and his associates. He hosted Donald TrumpJr and Jared Kushner in Belgrade, and, as we revealed, personally intervened to advance an allegedly illegal – and definitely very controversial – scheme to hand over a protected site in Belgrade for a Trump tower.
Source: www.theguardian.com
