BELGRADE – Following the resignation of Aleksandar Vučić, Ana Brnabić, who is the Speaker of the Serbian Parliament, assumed the duties of President of Serbia today.
Vučić resigned on Sunday after more than nine years as President. He is running to become Prime Minister of Serbia following the parliamentary election scheduled for 25 October 2026.
Vučić’s resignation means that an early presidential election will also have to take place by the end of the year. Until then, Brnabić will discharge presidential duties, which are largely ceremonial.
Brnabić, a close political ally of Vučić, first entered politics in 2016 as a Minister for Public Administration in a government headed by Vučić. After Vučić became President in 2017, Brnabić succeeded him as Prime Minister, holding that office until 2024, when she was elected as Speaker of Parliament.
Brnabić thus becomes the only person in Serbia’s history to hold all three of the highest offices of state, although she is only serving as President in an acting capacity.
Vučić announced in June that he would resign as President, saying that he did not want to use the office of President to his advantage during the election campaign. The report by the OSCE/ODIHR on the 2023 parliamentary election, in which he was the dominant figure in the campaign despite not being a candidate, noted that he had done exactly that.
“I want to compete, as an ordinary person, as a man of the people, against those who are against the people”, Vučić said in yesterday’s press conference, his final as President of Serbia.
In one of his final acts as president, Vučić issued dozens of pardons, stressing that he was pardoning “both sides”: opposition activists who had been charged with an attack on the constitutional order last year, as well as people connected to the ruling SNS, whose identites remain unknown so far.
The opposition activists, who mostly belong to the Novi Sad group STAV, stated today that they reject the President’s “clemency” and that they hope he would be held responsible for acts of repression against those who participated in the 2024-2025 protests.
