Vučić’s pompously announced Movement “vanished without a trace”: why it is not taking part in the 25 October elections

The Movement for the People and the State, announced by the then president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, in January 2025 at a rally of government supporters in Jagodina, was presented as the road towards “a good and secure future for Serbia”, as a platform for taking part in elections, and even as a revolution on Serbia’s political scene — as N1 recalls in its analysis published this morning. In February, at the rally in Sremska Mitrovica, Vučić declared that the formation of the initiative committee would begin on 15 March and that the movement would take shape by Vidovdan, stressing that there had to be room in it for new people.

The first meeting of the Initiative Committee was held on 23 March, attended by Vučić and by names such as Đuro Macut, Boris Bratina and Demo Berisha — who a few weeks later would take ministerial posts after the resignation of Prime Minister Miloš Vučević, N1 writes. There followed the movement’s registration with the Business Registers Agency and its presentation at government rallies, first in Belgrade in April and then in Niš in mid-May, where citizens could also sign a membership form. Right on the eve of the Niš rally, Vučić officially joined the movement, calling it not simply a membership, but a “promise and an oath to Serbia”. Several ministers followed his example, but official information on the number of people who joined the movement never saw the light of day — although the Minister of Information, Boris Bratina, declared in June 2025 for Insajder that, according to the data he had, the number of members had passed 100,000 already at the time of the Niš rally.

The big rally announced for Vidovdan, at which the movement’s formation was to be made official, was never held. There followed only the opening of the movement’s offices in Niš and Sombor, while the governing coalition parties were divided over joining it: Zavetnici expressed readiness, the Socialist Party of Serbia spoke of running jointly in the elections, while the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina refused. And although a minister in the Macut government, Demo Berisha, told Insajder in September that the Movement would contest the elections as soon as they were called, that did not happen in the local elections held in 10 municipalities at the end of March 2026 either — and its strength will not be measured in the early parliamentary elections of 25 October, N1 stresses.

Political scientist Ognjen Gogić reminds the N1 portal that this is the second time the idea of forming the movement has been launched publicly and that it suffered the same fate as in 2023. According to him, it was abandoned very early, before the Movement was presented visually and promoted to the public. “They did not even test it, they did not even try to brand it. That part is completely mysterious. There is no logic in why this is started twice within two years, only to be abandoned and for everyone to act as if it never existed,” Gogić tells N1. He adds that he cannot explain it otherwise than by the fact that they saw it could not pass: “Quite simply, the potential of that idea was not recognised. I can suppose that he was not satisfied, that there was not enough resonance, that there was no one to join it, so that it would not then be almost an expanded SNS. Because a movement makes sense when a larger number of actors join it.”

On the other hand, Gogić recalls that many of the things the SNS has done in recent years have been improvisation. “They started topics such as the declaration on Vojvodina, that Vojvodina is endangered, and abandoned those too. Then the story of the terrorist attack as the cause of the tent collapse. There were such things that they start and then abandon themselves and act as if they never existed. I can literally explain this with a kind of… I cannot say irresponsibility, but negligence; there is no longer that sharpness either in communication or in thought, but improvisation from today to tomorrow,” he tells N1.

Professor of the Faculty of Political Sciences Dušan Vučićević shares the same opinion, stressing that we sometimes overestimate the government’s moves. “Of the Movement announced for years, it seems only the buttons remain, which is best seen in these elections,” he tells N1. According to him, the separate run of the Socialist Party of Serbia and of the Social Democratic Party can be interpreted with data according to which a part of socialist voters would not vote for a Movement in which the party would lose even the little identity it has left, and that for Rasim Ljajić’s party the red line was a national coalition with Vojislav Šešelj — but the other moves of the regime bloc are just as difficult to explain. “In the elections we will also have Bogoljub Karić’s Movement of the Forces of Serbia, which can hardly enter the anti-regime voting body, so the question arises as to which voters they are independently targeting, while the Movement of Socialists was left not only without a place on the Serbian Progressive Party’s electoral list, but also without a coalition with Doctor Nestorović and the remnants of the People’s Party, so it seems we will not see Mr Vulin in the elections at all,” Vučićević says.

He adds that the other parties of the regime bloc, which were more or less ready to merge into the Movement, were not “greatly pleased” either. “And not only because some distinguished members and chairmen are not on the SNS list, but because in fact it is not a matter of a coalition list of the progressives and their partners, but of a single-party SNS electoral list, on which some individual from the other governing parties can be found. Put simply, neither Zavetnici nor the Party of Modern Serbia became part of the Movement for the People and the State, but in these elections they ceased to exist and are running as SNS candidates,” explains Professor Dušan Vučićević for N1.

With the expiry of the deadline for submitting lists, the Republic Electoral Commission proclaimed 16 lists for the 25 October elections — and the Movement for the People and the State is not among them. After all this, the story of the pompously announced Movement, as N1 summarises, has vanished without a trace both from the media and from the statements of government representatives.