Through Peaceful Means: What the Church Asks of Serbia Before It Votes

On Sunday evening Aleksandar Vučić stood outside the Presidency in Belgrade, told a flag-waving crowd it was his last night in the building, and signed his resignation. Then he went back to campaigning, this time for prime minister, in an October 25 election against a movement of students who have spent nearly two years in the streets over 16 people killed by a falling concrete canopy. The Church has a short, exact teaching on what an election is for, and it gives Serbians a standard for the next four weeks.

The News Story

Aleksandar Vučić resigned as president of Serbia on Sunday, September 27, about 7 months before his second and final five-year term was due to end in May 2027. Serbia’s constitution bars him from a third presidential term. He said he was stepping down to lead his right-wing Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) into the snap parliamentary election set for October 25, a route that would allow him to be appointed prime minister if the party forms the next government.¹

Vučić, 56, announced the decision to several hundred flag-waving supporters outside the Presidency building in central Belgrade, then signed the resignation. “This is the last evening for me in this building,” he told the crowd, according to Reuters. Reading the formal text, he said, “I am resigning the duty of the President of the Republic.” He had first said in late June that he intended to resign and that early parliamentary and presidential elections would follow.²

Under the constitution, Parliament Speaker Ana Brnabić, a close ally and former prime minister, becomes acting president for up to 3 months, and the presidential election has to be completed within 90 days. Vučić said the first round would be held by the end of December, so Serbian voters will go to the polls twice before the year is out. In one of his final acts, he pardoned 49 people, 23 of them arrested or tried in connection with the protests. Reuters reported that those 23 included 12 activists and 11 of his own supporters.³

The early elections were a central demand of a movement that began after the concrete canopy of a newly renovated railway station in Novi Sad collapsed on November 1, 2024, killing 16 people. Students led the demonstrations that followed, some of the largest in Serbia in decades, at times drawing hundreds of thousands of people into the streets. They have demanded accountability for the collapse, open accounting of public contracts and an end to corruption. Several officials, including 2 ministers, were arrested or resigned after the disaster. The government has denied the protesters’ accusations.⁴

The student movement is running as Students Win, with a list of 250 candidates made up largely of professors and other professionals and backed by several opposition parties. A pro-Western opposition alliance, European Serbia, is also running, as is the Socialist Party, an ally of the SNS. The AP reported that analysts see the student list and Vučić’s party polling close. Al Jazeera noted that the methods behind some Serbian polls are hard to verify independently.⁵

Rights groups accuse Vučić and his allies of increasingly authoritarian rule, and protesters say police have beaten them and detained them unfairly. Authorities deny those allegations. A Belgrade watchdog, the Independent Bureau for Social Research (BIRODI), has filed a complaint alleging that Vučić used the presidency to promote his party, which he has dismissed. On Sunday, he told the state broadcaster RTS, without offering evidence, that foreign powers planned to stir unrest on election night, the AP reported. Hours before resigning, he told CNN that he would accept the result and congratulate his opponents the same evening if they won.⁶

Vučić has held power as prime minister or president since 2014. Serbia’s bid to join the European Union has stalled under his leadership, which the AP attributed to democratic backsliding and Belgrade’s refusal to join sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine.⁷

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

What an Election Is For

The Church praises democracy for three specific things it does. Pope John Paul II put them in one sentence in 1991, and the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church adopts that sentence as its own judgment: “The Church values the democratic system inasmuch as it ensures the participation of citizens in making political choices, guarantees to the governed the possibility both of electing and holding accountable those who govern them, and of replacing them through peaceful means when appropriate.”⁸

Notice the word inasmuch. The praise is conditional. An election earns it when it lets a people choose, call to account, and, if they decide to, send someone home without a shot fired. John Paul drew the consequence in the next line: “Thus she cannot encourage the formation of narrow ruling groups which usurp the power of the State for individual interests or for ideological ends.”⁹

The Compendium spells out the mechanism. “In the democratic system, political authority is accountable to the people,” it says. “This control can be carried out above all in free elections which allow the selection and change of representatives.” The obligation on those elected to give an accounting of their work, it adds, is “a constitutive element of democratic representation.”¹⁰

St. Thomas Aquinas reached the same place seven centuries earlier. Asking what makes a people well governed, he put first “that all should take some share in the government,” and he counted it among the marks of the best polity that “the people have the right to choose their rulers.”¹¹ So the Church’s claim reaches much further back than modern liberal politics.

That is the principle. Serbia now has 4 weeks to show whether its election will do the three things the Church values it for.

Give the Man His Due

Start with what Vučić did right, because it’s more than his critics tend to allow. The constitution bars him from a third term, and he obeyed it. He gave up the office 7 months early, and his party now faces the early vote the students demanded for nearly two years. Among his last acts, he pardoned 23 people tied to the protests: 12 activists and 11 of his own supporters. And hours before resigning he told CNN that if the opposition won, he would accept the result and congratulate his opponents that same evening.

Nothing in Catholic teaching forbids a former president from asking voters to make him prime minister. The Catechism leaves this to the people: “the choice of the political regime and the appointment of rulers are left to the free decision of the citizens.”¹² If Serbians freely choose Vučić on October 25, the Church has no complaint against their choice. The Compendium even defends his room to lead once elected: accountability to voters, it says, still leaves an elected official the freedom he needs to pursue the common good.¹³

A Catholic can say all of that plainly, and should.

Where Accountability Gets Tested

But John Paul’s sentence praises what an election does, and that depends on the conditions around it. The Catechism names one of them. “It is preferable that each power be balanced by other powers and by other spheres of responsibility which keep it within proper bounds.”¹⁴ A vote is an accounting only when someone other than the ruler keeps the books.

So look at the books in Serbia this autumn. The acting president is Ana Brnabić, Vučić’s close ally. The Independent Bureau for Social Research (BIRODI) has filed a complaint alleging that he used the presidency to promote his party, and the AP reports that the anti-corruption authorities who would answer it sit under government control. In recent weeks, he has toured the country on pro-government television, opening roads and offering assistance money and cheaper medicines. And on the day he resigned, he told state television, without evidence, that foreign powers mean to stir unrest on election night. His party denies abusing office, and I can’t settle those allegations from here. What I can say is that each one is a question about whether the referee is also a player.

The Catechism has a sentence for exactly this. Those in authority “should take care that the regulations and measures they adopt are not a source of temptation by setting personal interest against that of the community.”¹⁵ A campaign run out of public office is that temptation in its purest form. The remedy is simple to state: let the electoral commission, the courts and the broadcasters answer to someone besides the man on the ballot.

A Roof in Novi Sad

Everything in this election goes back to a concrete canopy. On November 1, 2024, it fell at a newly renovated railway station and killed 16 people. The students who took to the streets asked who was responsible, how the public contracts had been handled, and who would answer for it. Several officials, including two ministers, were arrested or resigned. The government denies the broader charge of corruption.

The Compendium calls political corruption “one of the most serious” deformities of a democracy, “because it betrays at one and the same time both moral principles and the norms of social justice.” It describes the result with painful accuracy: “a growing distrust with respect to public institutions, bringing about a progressive disaffection in the citizens with regard to politics and its representatives.”¹⁶ And it names what a renovated station is. “Being at the service of its citizens, the State is the steward of the people’s resources, which it must administer with a view to the common good.”¹⁷

A steward gives an account. That is the whole content of the students’ demand, and it is the Church’s demand too. I don’t know what caused that canopy to fall; an honest investigation would. The October vote is one way for Serbians to insist on having it.

The Students Chose the Ballot

Last week this blog looked at Ethiopia, where an alliance decided to change a government with rifles. The Compendium, on that kind of choice, prefers passive resistance as “a way more conformable to moral principles and having no less prospects for success.”¹⁸ The students of Serbia have spent two years proving the second half of that sentence. They marched, they cycled from town to town, and now they’ve put 250 candidates on a ballot, most of them professors, teachers and other professionals.

The Catechism describes what they’ve been doing. Citizens’ loyal collaboration “includes the right, and at times the duty, to voice their just criticisms of that which seems harmful to the dignity of persons and to the good of the community.” It also says that exercising the vote is “morally obligatory.”¹⁹ Serbians have a hard four weeks ahead, and both of those duties will be tested.

The same standard binds the students if they win. A movement elected on accountability owes its own accounting on the first day in office, and the next one after that.

Before October 25

Watch the count, and watch who is allowed to check it. Watch whether Vučić keeps the promise he made to CNN, and whether his opponents would keep the same promise in reverse. An election that both sides accept before the results come in is the peaceful means John Paul had in mind.

And pray. Pray for the 16 who died at Novi Sad and for the families still waiting for an answer. Pray for Serbia’s Orthodox faithful and its Catholic minority, for the students on their bicycles and for the man who signed his resignation on Sunday night. Thomas said that when all share in the government, it “ensures peace among the people.”²⁰ Serbia could use a large share of that this autumn.

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This story turns on the accountability of political authority: the Church values democracy because it lets a people elect, call to account, and peacefully replace those who govern them.

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Notes

1. ↑ “Serbia’s populist President Vucic resigns to run for prime minister at early vote,” Associated Press via WDIV ClickOnDetroit, September 27, 2026, clickondetroit.com; “Vucic quits presidency, eyes Serbia PM role,” Reuters via Cyprus Mail, September 28, 2026, cyprus-mail.com; Armin Aljovic, “Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic resigns amid prolonged protests,” Al Jazeera, September 27, 2026, aljazeera.com.
2. ↑ Reuters, “Vucic quits presidency”; Associated Press, “Serbia’s populist President Vucic resigns.”
3. ↑ Reuters, “Vucic quits presidency”; Aljovic, “Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic resigns.”
4. ↑ Aljovic, “Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic resigns”; Reuters, “Vucic quits presidency”; Associated Press, “Serbia’s populist President Vucic resigns.”
5. ↑ Aljovic, “Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic resigns”; Associated Press, “Serbia’s populist President Vucic resigns”; Reuters, “Vucic quits presidency.”
6. ↑ Reuters, “Vucic quits presidency”; Associated Press, “Serbia’s populist President Vucic resigns”; Aljovic, “Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic resigns.”
7. ↑ Associated Press, “Serbia’s populist President Vucic resigns”; Reuters, “Vucic quits presidency.”
8. ↑ Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus: On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 1, 1991), no. 46, vatican.va; Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 406, vatican.va.
9. ↑ Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, no. 46.
10. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 408.
11. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 105, a. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
12. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1901, vatican.va.
13. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 409.
14. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1904.
15. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2236, vatican.va.
16. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 411.
17. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 412.
18. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 401.
19. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 2238, 2240.
20. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 105, a. 1.

Books Cited

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• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, Complete Set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)