This year ends with a debate in the Assembly on the conclusions of the European Commission's Report on Serbia's progress; the report, as we know, is "negative", Serbia is not satisfactorily evaluated, which is also seen in the decision not to open new accession chapters, and to bury in the place where it was as early as 2021. In the Parliament, the opposition emphasized this standstill as an impossibility for Serbia to achieve its strategic goals - which is to enter the EU, while for the regime this Report is confirmation that "hypocrisy rules the world" and that Serbia is being punished for its "libertarian and sovereignist policy".
THAT FAR BRUSSELS
In the year of upheaval in 2008, the radicals of that time, led by Tomislav Nikolić and Aleksandar Vučić, fell asleep one night as representatives of strategic policy embodied in the "ideology of the creation of Greater Serbia" and woke up as "Eurofanatics", ready to distance themselves from their teacher and leader Vojislav Šešelj, only to work with the rest of the political scene on the task of quickly including Serbia in the EU.
Seventeen years later, thirteen and a half of which they spent in power, it seems that the pendulum of transformation has swung back and there is no more Euro-enthusiasm - the former radicals are on the "factory political settings" and all that remains is for them, like Vojislav Šešelj and myself from 20 years ago, to start publicly burning EU flags.
The regime interprets Vučić's absence from the traditional large meeting of the leaders of the Western Balkan countries and the EU leaders last week as progress in relations with the EU - in the style of "they will see that we are strong and they will give in"; everyone else interprets it as Serbia's withdrawal from EU integration and the closure of the country. We'll see what she gets into.
If the official policy of Belgrade - without a strategic document, but it has been stated many times by Vučić and his team, those who have his permission to speak about it - is to "go towards the EU" and to protect "traditional friends", at the end of 2025, it seems that there is not much left of it.
After everything we have seen, especially in the last month or two, Serbia is "going towards the EU", but does not want to be in the EU, and it is not clear now who those traditional friends are that we do not renounce, and finally - what does the term "traditional friends" even mean.
Vučić's tendency to call those who please him and who like to please him his brothers is well known: at the end of the year, right after the collapse in Brussels, he hosted two brothers, the presidents of Georgia and Slovakia.
The president of Georgia is known for repression, for preventing the democratic development of the country he leads and for suspending negotiations with the EU, showing that the Russian Federation is much closer to him, both geographically and strategically. The President of Slovakia, whose function is mostly protocol and for whom this was a unique opportunity to travel - because Robert Fico, the Prime Minister of Slovakia, is the main political figure - represents a country that is in the EU, but is working hard to deconstruct the EU, like the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán.
So, at the end of the year, opponents of the EU, friends of Putin's Russia, advocates of sovereigntist politics were openly in Belgrade. We can imagine how those two visits were a balm for Vučić, who spent most of the year listening to some other voices, unpleasant for him, because they asked him only one thing - are you with us or against us?
photo: fonet / instagram of the president of SerbiaBRUSSELS NO LONGER BELIEVES PROMISES: U. von der Leyen and A. Vučić
"WINE VISION" AND THE POLICY OF ESCAPE
If in the spring of 2022 he said that Serbia should hide under a rock and make sure that the big war in the east of Europe does not touch it, if that was the strategy then, today it has come to an end and no one wants to listen too much about the uniqueness of Serbian politics, position, trauma or how everything here is denoted by what the rest of the world calls foreign policy. Although he boasted that he had read and was reading Henry Kissinger's thick and capital book Diplomacy, it does not seem that Vučić managed to really learn and apply any of it.
Even those who did not get a doctorate on Kissinger's "doctrine" know that he put strategy before everything else, and we always see Vučić as a tactician whose farthest vision reaches to the next kilometer of some road, which the "Corridors of Serbia" are paving with the Chinese and with Chinese money. It would be expected that he, as president, has some kind of vision, apart from the "Wine Vision", a trade mercantile event that he visits every year at the Belgrade Fair, and that someday we will hear what Serbia really wants in the future. In this way, he always follows a policy of panic in moments of crisis - you need to hide, you need to hide, whoever calls you, you call him, everyone is good and nice, don't declare anything, except that you don't want to align your foreign policy with the European Union. Moreover, Vučić and his loyalists do not call it alignment with the Union's foreign policy, but rather the introduction of sanctions against Russia, so here too it can be seen that Serbia does not have its own strategic position, but continues with the policy of "four legs" established by Boris Tadić in his second term - relying on Washington, Brussels, Moscow and Beijing.
These four legs needed to be strengthened this year, to keep them from breaking, and Vučić did make an effort to do that: he was in all four states, only he didn't make it to Washington, but he was in Florida and New York, he was in Beijing, he was twice in Brussels for a dinner and at a parade in Moscow.
VISITS MEASURED IN MINUTES
photo: fonet / instagram of the president of Serbia...
Although it seemed impossible to his opponents in Serbia, he struggled, and still does, to maintain the foreign policy course and approach he inherited from Boris Tadić. But unlike Tadić, who was involved in politics, Vučić relies more on mercantile and trade principles. He also added Turkey to his foreign policy, as a major regional player, which is not wrong, but this year it turned out to be insufficient. If at the beginning of his government he relied mostly on Germany and Angela Merkel, since her departure from the political scene it seems that there are no more open doors in Germany, so he turned to Emmanuel Macron in Paris, where he was for a few hours this fall as well, but that visit was not something he could publicly boast about at home. He also turned, in his sovereignistic manner, to the Italian Prime Minister Giorgi Meloni, who has grown into a respectable leader, but she also flew to Belgrade one afternoon this year for an hour or two and left without a joint photo shoot or press conference.
In short, 2025 was thin for Vučić when it comes to taking pictures and exchanging messages in front of journalists - the only time he was able to do that was during the visit of the Prime Minister of Austria, Christian Stoker, which was the only visit at the "highest level" this year in Belgrade, along with the quick May visit of Antonio Costa, the President of the European Council, who showed the most affection towards Vučić. Of course, Ursula von der Leyen also stopped by Belgrade in October, as part of her Balkan tour, and that visit was assessed as not so good for the regime in Belgrade. She, like two of her predecessors this year, asked Vučić for results, she waited almost two months after that and determined at a dinner in Brussels that only "a democratic Serbia can join the EU".
DON'T BE ANGRY, PUTIN
The protocol visit to Moscow in May 2025 was important in order for Vučić to show that "friends are not forgotten", but the meeting with Putin did not bring much, as we see even today when it comes to the crisis with the NIS. Relations with Moscow have been ambivalent all year - from the FSB being called to assess the use of a sound cannon at a civic rally on March 15, to the PR Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Zakharova's statements that Moscow "doesn't know which Vučić is talking to". This mistrust was further strengthened by the fact that Vučić visited Ukraine for the first time, followed by Ana Brnabić, and he admitted that he is ready to cede all of Serbia's dedicated production to the needs of the EU.
The end of the year marks his effort to preserve his "friendly position" towards Moscow and his efforts not to provoke the Kremlin's anger in any way, because he reckons that this could threaten him in his own electorate, the preservation of which he is desperately fighting. It's simple - he must not anger Putin because he made him a figure that his voters love more than himself, and now he is looking at how to protect Serbia from sanctions, while Putin remains a "brother". It is not Vučić's fault that Serbia decided to put its energy security in the hands of Russia in 2008, but he is responsible for not doing anything in the field of changing that status for all these years and now, allegedly, and this is a strategic mistake, Serbia "cannot survive" without the Russian energy sector.
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He met Putin for a short time, five minutes officially, and for more than half an hour according to the reports of "his media" in Beijing at the Chinese celebration of the victory in the Second World War. There he also met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, with whom he was probably able to determine the status of Chinese investments in Serbia. After the fall of the canopy in Novi Sad in 2024 and the initiation of investigations, it turned out that Chinese companies could also be held accountable, but this has not been the case for now, nor does it seem that it could be. If Serbian institutions cannot or must not sanction Chinese companies and Chinese citizens doing business in Serbia, this is what US Customs did at the end of this year by imposing sanctions on the Linglong company, the largest tire factory in the vicinity of Zrenjanin. Before that, the EU introduced additional tariffs on steel, potentially jeopardizing the future of the Smederevo ironworks, also owned by the Chinese company HBIS.
WORSE THAN WORSE
Vučić's unsuccessful strategic connection with the USA also showed that one trouble follows another. His "silent teacher" Kissinger would say that it is always better to "have strategic relations than to be a tactical tool of great powers", but Vučić failed in that field as well. The reasons for his departure to Florida, from which he returned after appearing on Rudy Giuliani's lover's podcast, are still under wraps, according to official reports, due to heart and blood pressure problems. It remained unclear what he was looking for there and whether he was ill-advised that it was possible for him, as president, to pay for dinner at Donald Trump's residence and business club in Florida, Mar-a-Lago.
Unfortunately for Vučić, and unfortunately for Serbia, this was not the only failure in relations with America. During the summer, we learned that the sending of Marko Brnović to the position of ambassador to Serbia, which the regime in Belgrade was looking forward to, was abandoned, and the meeting with Trump at his reception on the occasion of the UN General Assembly in New York, which was attended by everyone except Vučić, failed. At the time, he boasted that he was one of the few who met with the head of the US administration, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, but it seems that at that meeting he only presented when the sanctions against the NIS would come into force and the request to Belgrade to sever relations with the Putin regime.
At the end of the year, the news arrived that Donald Trump's son-in-law was giving up construction in Belgrade on the site of the General Staff complex, and that Trump had signed the Law on the Western Balkans, in which Serbia was assessed as an undemocratic state. The legs of Serbian foreign policy are wobbly, they are about to snap, and the only question is whether one of them remains intact.
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Knowing all this, Vučić made chapras divans for himself with exotic African and Polynesian leaders, showing how much he loves to study geography and not only knows how to name every place in Serbia, but also the names of the smallest island states in the Pacific Ocean. Kissinger would have told him that geography is key in foreign policy, but Vučić seems to have understood it differently - he is attracted to introduce us to "new countries", and the result of that "policy" was the withdrawal of recognition of Kosovo and new markets for Serbian dedicated industry.
This year, he managed to maintain cordial relations with Israel in the days when sanctions are being imposed on that country and more and more European countries do not want to have diplomatic relations with the government that seems to have committed genocide in Gaza against the people of Palestine. In addition to this, Vučić was in Japan, he saw the Japanese emperor and visited a real world exhibition in Osaka, probably to get inspiration for the Expo or simply to honor a certain minister with an exclusive trip.
When we look at the year behind us, we see that Serbia had no foreign policy until April - Vučić and the regime dealt with ways to stop and disable student and popular protests and there were almost no activities. When March 15 passed and when he realized that he was still in power, he tried to see what was happening around us, in the world. There, Trump already had the main speech, because it seems easier for him to "stop seven or eight wars" than to curb inflation at home. There, the world was divided, a great geopolitical game was played between the most powerful, the USA and China the most, and indications were made of the world and relations that will appear perhaps as early as 2026.
In the changed world context, Serbia without a strategic commitment and a real strategy in foreign relations looks like a country that is trying to balance by promising something to someone on one side, and by buying something from someone on the other side. Its leader simultaneously says how proud we are, how small and miserable we are, how libertarian we are, but how we don't ask about anything. Estimates show that at the end of the year, Serbia will have to decide which side to take in the conflict on the territory of Europe, which seems like an impossible mission for Vučić and his voters. Because, if in 2012 he managed to keep some radical votes on his side even though he renounced Seselj, today he is looking for an option to renounce Putin, save the country from sanctions, and not lose the trust of those who love Putin more than him. And if that is the biggest dilemma, then it is clear what kind of danger a country is in, whose future relies on the rating of one person, and that at home, not abroad.
He has already lost on the side, but he is still the only one to negotiate with.
