Serbia's Vucic calls snap elections after nearly two years of protests

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic on Wednesday dissolved parliament and called snap parliamentary elections for October 25, a key demand of the country's long-running protest movement.

Parliamentary elections were not due until December 2027, but Vucic called the early vote after nearly two years of anti-government demonstrations.

"I am calling parliamentary elections for October 25," Vucic said in a nationally televised address.

An anti-graft protest movement has gripped the country since the November 2024 collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad, which killed 16 people.

The tragedy was widely blamed on entrenched corruption and fuelled demonstrators' anger, drawing some of the largest crowds since the fall of strongman Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

Initial calls for a transparent investigation evolved into demands for snap elections, which Vucic had repeatedly promised, but without setting a date.

"We have seen major turbulence on the domestic political scene over the past year and a half," Vucic said.

"We need election results that will clearly reflect the will of the people," he added.

The protest movement, emerging from student-led university blockades, has demanded early elections since May 2025 and is preparing its own electoral list.

It poses the biggest challenge yet to nationalist Vucic, 56, who has dominated Serbian politics for more than a decade as prime minister or president.

Since the start of the protest movement, Vucic and his allies have accused the students of seeking to stage a "foreign-funded revolution".

He repeated the accusation while calling the election.

"We have seen not only signs of foreign interference, but significant involvement by foreign powers, as well as unrest, disorder and clashes, and above all a divided society," Vucic said.

Elected president in 2017 and re-elected in 2022 for a five-year term, Vucic recently said he would resign after formally calling the election to campaign, signalling his ambitions to return as prime minister.

Vucic faced widespread criticism from EU leaders in the past week over the public homage to war criminal Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army commander, who was buried as a hero in Serbia on Monday despite his conviction for genocide by a UN court.

His right-wing populist Serbian Progressive Party decided at a weekend meeting to ask him to head its electoral list and stand as its candidate for prime minister.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and AP)