Aleksandar Vucic was ready to hold on to power by force after losing Serbia's October 25 election but backed down, a former police commander and politicians told The Times.
"He sent 4,000 police and 3,000 thugs to central Belgrade to protect the regime on Sunday - I am 100 per cent sure he was planning to refuse the result," Spasoje Vulevic, a former head of Serbia's anti-terrorism police unit, told the London newspaper in a report by Tom Kington published on October 27.
Vucic's spokeswoman denied any plan, telling The Times that the police presence in Belgrade was a response to threats of protester violence and was not linked to a power grab. The claims rest on a handful of named critics of the president and on rumour, and no evidence of an order to use force has been published. If true, they would recast a concession that was widely read as a peaceful handover: the Student List won a landslide that ended 14 years of rule by Vucic's Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), and Vucic conceded within hours.
As IntelliNews argued in a recent op-ed “election earthquake in Serbia” repression and violence are key tools for long-serving authoritarian leaders that want to hang on to their jobs, but neither option was available to Vucic without sparking major protests and possibly a colour revolution in the style of Ukraine’s Maidan protests or those in Minsk.
According to the newspaper's sources, Vucic backed down when the Student List's 500,000-vote lead became clear and he received calls urging him not to fight on. At 9.30pm, 90 minutes after the polls closed, he gave up and the men gathered in the centre of the capital vanished, peppered with stones and trash as they pasted the crowds on the street.
Radomir Saicic, a leading Student List candidate tipped for high office in the next government, made the same claim.
"They had a plan to overturn the vote with brute force if the result was close, but I have information he got many calls from the police and others which changed his mind," Saicic said. "He was persuaded it would go really badly for him if he carried out his plan."
Saicic also said a former police officer who had warned colleagues against beating and shooting protesters received an anonymous threat reading: "The first bullet is for you."
As voters turned out in record numbers, men dressed in black were seen heading towards Pioneers' Park, opposite parliament, to reoccupy a tent camp where Vucic supporters had squatted for months, The Times reported. "They were sent in in small groups, 20 to 30 at a time," Vulevic said. Gendarmerie officers took up positions, roads were closed to traffic and street lights were switched off, according to the paper.
Sandro Gozi, an MEP who heads the European Democratic Party in the European Parliament, said his group had received "alarming reports on Sunday from diplomatic sources that he was ready to fight and stage a coup". At 6.43pm on election day the group issued a statement warning that Vucic's party "may be mobilised to provoke confrontations at around 9pm tonight, as the first election projections emerge".
"I can't exclude calls were made, but in any case the voting against him was simply too big, Vucic was just taken aback," Gozi said of why Vucic stood down. Vulevic said he believed Vucic "got calls from European governments - conversations at the highest level", but not from police officers, since every commander running units in Belgrade had been handpicked by Vucic. Unconfirmed rumours in Belgrade credit Viktor Orban, who lost Hungary's election in April, with talking him down, the paper said.
Rade Djuric, a lawyer at the Independent Journalists' Association of Serbia, told the paper he suspected the plan had been to cite voting irregularities and call for reruns, which would have provoked protests. "They would have then stoked violence and used it as another excuse for cancelling the vote," he said.
Vulevic, a critic of the president, commanded the Special Anti-Terrorist Unit (SAJ) from 2005 until he was removed in September 2025, a move the interior ministry said was at his own request and N1 reported came at Vucic's request.
Georg von Ehren, who writes on Southeast Europe on X as @suedostX and was in Belgrade on election night, called the account unconvincing in a thread posted after the report, though not out of any faith in Vucic, whose rule "had become increasingly authoritarian over the years".
"Vucic is an experienced political operator. Trying to overturn a clear electoral defeat by force would have carried enormous risks, with potentially devastating consequences for him and for Serbia," von Ehren wrote.
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