Insiders say that Aleksandar Vulin is one of the most important collaborators of Aleksandar Vučić. On the list of useful and loyal people of the prime minister, he is said to be above most of the more visible progressives, although it is not clear why this is so. It is difficult to assess whether it is successfully doing its job (in which it is no different from Vučić's government), partly because of the untruths that the officials present, partly because of the lack of transparency and lack of communication with the "disobedient" media.
Vulin himself is increasingly logorheic, and his hair and clothes are neater in comparison July phase. Leaders at progressive party gatherings announce him as an energetic speaker, and he justifies it with pathetic and kitsch stylistic figures and gesticulations.
LEFTIST HAIRCUTTING: He was born in Novi Sad in 1972, where he finished elementary school. Later, he failed the remedial course in mathematics at the Karlovac High School, from where he went to a political rally for the first time - against the autonomists during the "yogurt revolution". He graduated from the Faculty of Law in Kragujevac and in 1990 joined the League of Communists - Movement for Yugoslavia (SKPJ), where he was referred by the dying League of Communists of Yugoslavia. There, surrounded by temporary generals, he easily reached the position of general secretary, and he continued his political advancement in the Yugoslav Left, in the founding of which he participated together with Mirjana Marković, a colleague from SKPJ and with the help of her powerful husband. Without cutting his long hair and without changing his image as an ardent leftist, a fighter for workers' rights and social justice, he became a spokesman and deputy chairman of the Party Directorate in JUL. "No matter how much I advanced in the party hierarchy, I still put up posters," he described his commitment to the ideas of JUL.
He participates in suppressing demonstrations against Milosevic's regime, defending him in his speeches. The demonstrators against whom the police used water cannons in the winter of 1997 will remember him for the sentence: "Should they have poured hot water on them?!", or for the one after the shutdown of RTV B92, when he was asked if he really believed that was the cause of the shutdown that "the rain got into the coax cable": "I'm not much of a believer, but if God decided to send rain those two days, then he did."
He left JUL in 1998, allegedly for ideological reasons, because that party "became a mask for the rich", and he was against the coalition with Vojislav Šešelj's SRS, as well as the entry of Drašković's SPO into the federal government. The third reason could be that he did not get the promised parliamentary seat in the National Assembly.
In parallel with his political career, he is also developing a journalistic career. He is close to the kings of tabloid newspapers and tabloid television, Robert Čoban and Željko Mitrović. He writes a column in the newspaper "Svet", which he usually started with verses by Johnny Štulic; in the photo in the corner of the column, he posed next to a framed Che Guevara. Later, he was also a director in some of Čoban's companies, worked in a marketing agency. He wrote and was an editor in nationalist-radical newspapers such as "Pečat" and "Pravda", and he also worked on radio "Index". He also wrote three books. Until recently, there was a promotional film on YouTube in which Vulin meets Karl Marx in person and takes him around Belgrade, showing him what is left of leftist ideas.
At the end of 2000, he founded the Party of the Democratic Left, which two years later, together with the Democratic Socialist Party of Milorad Vučelić, merged into the Socialist Party of Serbia. He left Ivica Dačić in 2006 after the "suitcase affair", allegedly due to reconciliation with the Democratic Party. Later, he spoke rather unkindly about Dacic. In 2003, he led protests against the arrest of General Veselin Šljivančanin, for which he clashed with the police and was detained for a month. During that period, he cut his hair short, he said that Bora Chorba was disappointed because of it. He founded the Socialist Movement, whose president he is today, in 2008.
DECADE-LONG FRIENDSHIP: The friendship of Aleksandar Vulin and Aleksandar Vučić has been going on since 1993 and the televised duel of the two on Studio B television, when both of them "realized that they understood each other humanly".
In November 2010, when Tomislav Nikolić and his deputy Vučić formed a coalition for future victories, alongside Velimir Ilić's New Serbia and Bogoljub Karić's "Strength of Serbia" movement, Vulin and his Socialist Movement also signed the coalition agreement. Since the progressive conquest of power in 2012, Vulin has been on his way to the top of the state from the Rakovica Municipal Assembly, through the Belgrade City Assembly and the National Assembly. In August 2013, he was elected as the director of the Office for Kosovo and Metohija, where he remained in a striking black uniform until the reconstruction of the Government, when he received a ministerial position without a portfolio, but in charge of Kosovo and Metohija. After signing the Brussels Agreement with representatives of the unrecognized government from Pristina, he submitted his resignation "to a better man than himself" live on the RTS show. However, "at the request of the Serbs from Kosmet" and the aforementioned Vučić himself, not only did he not leave, but he also became the president of the newly formed committee for the implementation of that very agreement. After the 2014 elections, he was appointed to the position of Minister of Labour, Employment, Veterans and Social Affairs, which he still does today. Ever since Vučić became a minister, he has had a haircut under the thread.
THE ORATOR IN BLACK SKIN: Vulin has been a passionate and energetic speaker since the beginning of his political career. Since he entered progressive stage, he always stands at the microphone very upright and well-groomed, neatly dressed and combed. When he is not gesturing with his hands, he holds them crossed in front of him. He never reads from paper and almost never smiles, mostly dead serious and frowning. He does not speak straight, but changes the volume of his voice, uses banal gradations, hyperboles, metonymy...
His speech bursts with pathos, like the one from January 2010 from Kuršumlija: "I came with you today to share anger when we can no longer share bread." I came today to share my anger with you because there is no bread. I came today with you to share the anger of seeing hungry mothers and their hungry children. I came today with you to share the anger when the border lets me go. If you fall, if Kuršumlija is extinguished and my Novi Sad will be able to pack up..." This pathos is not removed even at party gatherings, such as the convention of the Serbian Progressive Party in 2012 (before the arrival Progressive to power): "They don't hear you. Our rulers do not hear or see you. You are not heard or seen by our rulers hidden behind high walls and the backs of bodyguards. They don't hear and don't see the million unemployed, they don't feel ashamed that Serbia is the only place in the world where mothers hide their pregnancies so that their employers don't leave them on the street..." When it comes to national topics, there is no equal. He preached in Sisak in October 2015: "There are few peoples on the globe who can count and enumerate so many names of their murdered children." There are few peoples on earth where great-grandchildren and grandchildren often imagine their grandparents' brothers only as children because they could not see or imagine them in any other way. There are few peoples on the globe who, like the Serbs, cannot go through at least one generation in which there is not a single story about a child kidnapped from his mother's arms and impaled on a bayonet. There are few people."
VUCIC'S VENTILATOR: In the last four years, Vulin has been a regular guest in most of the special shows of the progressive television service RTV "Pink", where he explains, complements and interprets Vučić's policy and exposes various coups. Before the referendum in Republika Srpska, Vučić forbade his ministers to respond to the provocations of their colleagues across the Drina. "Blic" asked Vulina how difficult it was for him to "obey" that recommendation. "I bit my tongue until it bled," he replied.
After a few days ago in Belgrade, Albanian President Edi Rama called on Prime Minister Vučić to recognize Kosovo, Vulin commented: "Serbia is led by a recognized statesman, and Albania is led by a small politician." Serbia is led by a statesman, and the word of a statesman is heard further and listened to longer. Serbia was proud of its prime minister today, Albania was not so lucky." Defending the prime minister's austerity measures, in March 2015 he also commented on Greece's financial problems: "If our brotherly Greece had one Aleksandar Vučić at the head of the government seven years ago when started the crisis, it would not be in such a difficult situation as it is today. It wouldn't. Because in time she would understand what saving means and what work means."
There were also "leftist" ideas such as the one to fence off Serbia because of refugees coming from the Middle East, proposals for measures such as the one that social assistance will be earned through socially useful work...
Vulin never misses an opportunity to speak affirmatively about Milošević's policies and vigorously asserts that Serbia is not to blame for any war. Biting his tongue or not, it seems this revolutionary is always on the wrong side of history, most successful in the role of spokesman for each of his bosses.
