How Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic sees the world

Al Jazeera · Feb 28, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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On May 13, 1990, in Zagreb, two of Yugoslavia’s biggest football teams, Red Star Belgrade and the home team, Dinamo Zagreb, were set to play in the Maksimir Stadium of the Croatian capital. Among the excited Red Star fans riding on the train to Zagreb that day was a young law student named Aleksandar Vucic.On the streets, fights began breaking out between rival fans. Cafe tables were flipped over, windows smashed. But the real ruckus erupted at the stadium, where Red Star fanatics, led by Serbian gangster Zeljko Raznatovic, aka Arkan, broke through the barrier holding them back and rushed at the Dinamo supporters, with punches and chairs thrown by both sides.“They threw everything they had at us [until] there were no more chairs to hurl at each other,” Vucic recounted in a magazine interview 20 years later.Dinamo supporters then stampeded the pitch, where their team jumped into the fray, assaulting police officers, and the game was officially called off before it began.Over the next hour, authorities tried to restore order, playing soothing music over the loudspeakers to try to calm the mob. Two fire engines were dispatched to hose the fans, who pelted the trucks with stones.Trading insults and fisticuffs are hardly unusual in football hooliganism, but the riots laid bare the ethnic fault lines that would soon lead to the violent breakup of Yugoslavia.“It was already a conflict between Serbs and Croats, not Red Star and Dinamo fans,” Vucic explained in the same interview. “Football is always just a reflection of what is happening in society.”Maksimir exemplified the toxic nationalism and football hooliganism that have shadowed Vucic’s rise to dominate Serbian politics for more than a decade as prime minister from 2014 to 2017, and since then, as president.As war raged through the former Yugoslavia, Vucic began his political career with a far-right group calling for a “Greater Serbia”. In 1995, merely days after Bosnian Serb forces perpetrated a genocide against Bosniaks, Vucic threatened to kill hundreds if outside powers intervened.Two decades later, after founding a new, more centrist party, Vucic paid his respects to the Srebrenica victims and called the killings a “monstrous crime”. However, he has never recognised the crimes as a genocide and opposed the 2024 United Nations vote establishing an annual remembrance day. Meanwhile, he has led negotiations for Serbia to join the European Union and strengthened ties with China and Russia. Since taking the presidency in 2017, he has consolidated power and curbed democratic freedoms.Throughout, allegations of criminality have plagued his presidency – from football thugs to graft reaching the halls of power – as anticorruption protests continue into their second year.Amid the antigovernment protests, what motivates his grip on power, and how does he see the world today?Red Star football fans fight each other during the Yugoslav Cup final match against Partizan in Belgrade, Serbia, on May 9, 2001 [Reuters]A young football thugVucic was born in 1970 in Belgrade, the capital of a country that no longer exists: Yugoslavia, a vast land home to many ethnic groups spanning what is now seven nations in southeastern Europe.Vucic’s family fled their home village of Cipuljic in central Bosnia to escape the Ustase, Croatian fascists who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. The family left after Vucic’s grandfather, a prosperous merchant, was murdered by collaborators in 1941. He’d offended them by serving a keg of rakija (a strong Balkan brandy) to passersby outside his shop in solidarity with anti-German demonstrations in Belgrade.The Ustase sought a Greater Croatia, attempting to achieve this by throwing Serbs, Jews and Roma into death camps. A violent Serb movement, the Chetniks, organised in response, but their own ambitions of a Greater Serbia led them to massacre Bosniaks and Croats, and eventually, to collaborate with the Nazis.But it was Josip Broz Tito’s communist, multiethnic Partisans who ultimately prevailed against the Nazi occupation.Tito went on to lead post-war Yugoslavia, refusing to be drawn into either camp during the Cold War. Yugoslavs were much freer and enjoyed a decent standard of living compared with their neighbours behind the Iron Curtain, and could easily travel abroad, including a young Vucic, who spent a year learning English in the British seaside town of Brighton in the late 1980s. It was, nevertheless, a dictatorship, where nationalism and religion were suppressed.After the death of Tito – who was of Croat-Slovene descent – in 1980, his vision of a multiethnic Yugoslavia began crumbling. The Yugoslav army, as well as the central government in Belgrade, became increasingly dominated by Serbs led by strongman and eventual president, Slobodan Milosevic.It was around this time that Vucic, then in his late teens, got drawn into the football hooligan scene through his favourite team, Red Star, whose fans had a reputation as hardcore Serbian nationalists.Vucic often brings up this past. Once, he boasted of having been in 50 fights. “Even when I was beaten up around the stadium or in the stands, I never reported it to the police. I behaved like a slobbery [rascal] who still held onto his honour,” he told a Serbian tabloid.According to a New York Times article about Vucic’s alleged underworld ties, after one particularly heated game in 1988, the future president and his friends went “hunting” for Albanians on the streets of Belgrade and got into a fight.“I don’t like him now, but he was brave, brave in the fight,” said a self-professed hooligan who fought alongside Vucic that day.Branizlav Saric, 47, helps his friend Mustafa Cemalovic, 40, who has just been hit by shrapnel from a mortar shell that exploded less than 90 metres (295 feet) from the UN’s main headquarters in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on July 11, 1995, during the city’s nearly four-year siege [Enric F Marti/AP Photo]‘Kill one Serb and we will kill 100 Muslims’The Yugoslav wars began in 1991, when Slovenia, followed by Croatia, and then Bosnia, declared independence. Common criminals became warlords as paramilitaries, such as Arkan’s Tigers, backed by Milosevic’s government in Belgrade, committed atrocities against Bosniaks and Croats.“Reports suggest that figures like Arkan recruited supporters directly from [football stadium] stands [into paramilitaries],” explained Sasa Dorđevic, a Serbia expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.Bosnia – with its multiethnic population of Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats – suffered the most.From 1992 to 1995, the capital Sarajevo was besieged by Bosnian Serb forces, the longest siege in modern history, as they tried, but never succeeded, to take the city. Civilians ran for cover through the main boulevard of the city, nicknamed Sniper Alley, dodging bullets fired from nearby hillsides.Vucic, then a law student in Belgrade, felt isolated on campus due to the political landscape – then split between Milosevic’s government and the opposition. In 1992, he volunteered with Bosnian Serb forces for 40 days behind the front lines. What he did exactly remains a matter of contention. Jovana Polic, a Serbian journalist who directed two documentaries about Vucic, said he worked at the Bosnian Serb propaganda television station Kanal S in Pale.“He claims to have interviewed [Bosnian Serb leader] Radovan Karadzic, and even managed to play a quick game of chess with [General] Ratko Mladic,” Polic said, emphasising that both men were later convicted of war crimes.As commander of the Bosnian Serb army, Mladic orchestrated the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica genocide.After returning from Bosnia, Vucic, then 23, found a political home with the far-right Serbian Radical Party.A spiritual successor to the Chetniks, the Radicals’ chief platform was a “Greater Serbia” encompassing most of the former Yugoslavia.A video from 1995 shows Vucic visiting Serb positions in the wooded valley around Sarajevo alongside the Radicals’ leader Vojislav Seselj, often described as Vucic’s “political father,” who once said he’d scoop out Croats’ eyeballs with a rusty spoon.In the clip, Vucic is seen carrying a long, thin object, speculated to be a rifle, which he has denied, claiming to have never fired a gun.Vucic’s rise through the party was meteoric. In 1993, he was elected to parliament as the country’s youngest MP, and less than two years later, became the party’s general secretary.Then, in July 1995, the worst atrocity in Europe since the second world war took place in Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia. Bosnian Serb forces rounded up and systematically murdered more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys.Just days later, speaking before Serbia’s parliament, Vucic warned against the interference of outside powers. “If you kill one Serb, we will kill a hundred Muslims,” he said.Nevertheless, in late 1995, following NATO bombardment against Bosnian Serb forces, the leaders of Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia agreed to end the conflict by signing the Dayton Accords.In 1997, Serbia held elections, and the Radicals, to the extreme right of Milosevic and his followers, joined his governing coalition. The same year, Vucic married his first wife, Ksenija Jankovic, a journalist, with whom he’d have two children: a son, Danilo, and a daughter, Milica.The former Ministry of Defence building in Belgrade remains as a memorial, its side obliterated by a NATO bomb [File: Niko Vorobyov/Al Jazeera]Minister of wartime propagandaBut there was still the question of Kosovo: an autonomous province within Yugoslavia, formally part of Serbia but populated chiefly by ethnic Albanians.Albanians wanted their own republic and ultimately, independence. But Kosovo, as the site of the 1389 battle between Serbs and Ottoman forces, holds immense symbolic, patriotic value in Serb national memory. In early 1998, clashes broke out between Albanian guerrillas and the Yugoslav army (now consisting of only Serbi