Vučić says he will resign the Serbian presidency on 27 September and run for prime minister

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić said on 15 September that he will hand in his resignation on 27 September, address the public that evening, and then campaign as a private citizen for prime minister in the snap parliamentary election on 25 October.

He spoke on the private channel Pink TV. He said he would thank citizens for their support and noted that he has been president longer than anyone else since the multi-party system began. He said he planned to travel by ordinary car and a pickup truck through villages and cities.

The ruling Serbian Progressive Party's main board named him lead candidate and its choice for prime minister on 5 September. Vučić dissolved the National Assembly on 9 September and set the vote for 25 October. The party list is expected to run under the banner United Serbia.

The clock the constitution starts

Vučić was prime minister from 2014 to 2017. He won the presidency in 2017 and again in 2022. The current term ends in May 2027. The constitution caps the presidency at two five-year terms, so he could not stand again for that office in 2027. A resignation on 27 September starts a separate clock: a presidential election must be held within 90 days of the vacancy.

That means Serbia is now looking at a parliamentary vote on 25 October and a presidential vote in late December or early January unless the dates are later aligned. Vučić has said he wants his party to win both. He will not be on the presidential ballot if he has left the office to run for the premiership.

Why leave early

Student-led protests have run for more than a year after the Novi Sad railway station canopy collapse. Opposition groups treat that disaster as proof of rotten public works. Vučić has called parts of the protest story fabricated, including claims of a sound cannon at a March 2025 rally in Belgrade, and has said some organisers tried to push the country toward a deeper split.

Moving from the presidency to the premiership would put him back in day-to-day control of the cabinet and the budget, which is where those protests are aimed. It would also let him pick a successor for the presidency from inside the party. That successor would hold the formal command of the armed forces and the foreign-policy role while Vučić ran the government.

He first said in June that he would resign within weeks. The September date is the first firm day he has put on the record. It sits after the UN General Assembly high-level week, so he can still speak in New York as head of state, then come home and step down.

What the vote will test

The Progressive Party has dominated Serbian politics for a decade. The opposition is split among student lists, older Democratic Party figures, and smaller nationalist and liberal groups. Vučić told Pink that he does not see real students behind one opposition list and named former Democratic Party president Bojan Pajtić and vice-president Dušan Petrović as the people he believes stand behind it. Those claims are campaign talk. They show how he intends to frame the autumn.

If he wins the premiership, the presidency becomes a vacancy the party must fill without him on the ticket. If he loses the parliamentary vote, he will have given up the last two years of a term he was legally allowed to finish. The 27 September letter is the point at which that bet becomes irreversible.