Vučić says he will resign after the UN meeting and campaign as a citizen for 25 October

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić said he will leave office on 25 or 26 September, immediately after he returns from the 81st United Nations General Assembly in New York, local outlets reported this week. Early parliamentary elections are set for 25 October. Vučić told interviewers he wants to start that campaign as an ordinary citizen on behalf of the Serbian Progressive Party, the party he founded.

The general debate in New York runs from 22 to 28 September, with 27 September off. Vučić’s date therefore sits at the end of that week. He first promised in June, at a Belgrade rally, that he would be president for only a few more weeks. The June remarks followed a year and a half of student-led protests that began after a railway-station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in November 2024 and killed 16 people. Demonstrators treated the disaster as proof of rotten public works. They have demanded a snap parliamentary vote for more than a year.

Vučić is in his second presidential term, which was due to run to mid-2027. Serbian law bars a third consecutive term. The premiership is the office with day-to-day command of the government. He held that post from 2014 to 2017 before moving to the presidency. Allies have been saying out loud since June that he should return to it. Party leader Miloš Vučević called him the natural choice. Parliament speaker Ana Brnabić said she hoped he would accept the invitation to stand as the Progressive candidate for prime minister.

The sequence now on the table is resignation, a short interval as a private citizen, then a campaign for a parliamentary list. Once a president resigns, a presidential election must be held within 90 days. Vučić has said he will help the party win that race as well. In June he floated the label “United Serbia” for the winning list. On Pink TV this week he described the October vote as a contest in which every citizen could decide whom to trust.

Students who have spent 18 months on the streets wanted an early election on their timetable, not his. They argue that a campaign run by a man who has just stepped down from the presidency is not a level field. Vučić’s camp presents the same move as an answer to the street: he is leaving the office they attacked and asking voters to put him somewhere else. Both readings can be true at once. The legal fact is smaller. He cannot run for president again. He can run for parliament and, if the numbers work, take the premiership.

Serbia has lived with Progressive dominance since 2012. The Novi Sad collapse was the first event in that stretch that produced a protest movement large enough to force a date onto the calendar. The date is now 25 October. Vučić’s resignation, if it arrives on 25 or 26 September as he now says, will start the clock on a presidential ballot and strip him of the formal title before the campaign ads begin. What remains is the party, the list, and a country that has been arguing for a year about whether a change of office is a change of power.