Since its founding, the SPS has cultivated close political ties with Russia. The party has developed cooperation with Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, while its leader, Dacic, has repeatedly stressed the importance of Russian support for Serbia in the issue of non-recognition of Kosovo’s independence.
After more than three decades of political survival, including the fall of Slobodan Milosevic’s regime and two decades under the leadership of Ivica Dacic, the Socialist Party of Serbia is facing its worst defeat yet. One of the country’s longest-running and most adaptable political forces, it has been left out of parliament for the first time since its founding in 1990. In the October 25 elections, the Socialists won just over 90.000 votes, insufficient to pass the three percent electoral threshold.
The party was founded by Serbia’s autocratic former president, Slobodan Milosevic, and for the past 20 years has been led by the Russia-oriented Ivica Dacic, who is the outgoing interior minister. Since the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) came to power in 2012, the Socialists have been its stable partner in the governing coalition. The Progressives also suffered their first electoral defeat since coming to power 14 years ago, as the Student List won the elections convincingly with 2.2 million votes. The party, which led the country to wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo in the 90s, survived the changes of October 5, 2000, when the Milosevic regime was overthrown.
However, on the eve of the elections, the SPS was left without several senior officials, while some of its young people also left the party. “The Socialists did not understand the historical moment that Serbia is in, and this will cost them their political extinction,” political scientist Duško Radosavljević told Radio Free Europe (RFE/RL).
THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE REFERENDUM EXTENDED THE SPS FROM THE POLITICAL SCENE
According to unofficial election results, the SPS won 2.16 percent of the vote, which was not enough to pass the electoral threshold. The elections were characterized by a high voter turnout of 68 percent; the highest since the federal and presidential elections in September 2000. Although 18 lists participated in the election race, the atmosphere was similar to that of a referendum and the favorites were two lists: “United Serbia”, led by the SNS, and the list created by massive anti-government protests and student blockades, after the death of 16 people from the collapse of a shelter at the entrance to the railway station, on November 1, 2024. “The socialists failed to understand this. Until the end, they remained victims of the policy they themselves implemented in the 90s, which is based on the unscrupulous robbery of citizens,” says Radosavljevic.
Socialist leader Ivica Dacic said on Sunday evening that he was not satisfied with the result, saying it was a result of the “referendum atmosphere.” “The Socialist Party of Serbia, together with its coalition partners, tried in such an atmosphere, with a separate list representing its identity, to occupy a certain political space, and unfortunately, we did not manage to secure the desired result,” Dacic said at the SPS election headquarters in Belgrade. He described the defeat as “a lost battle” and added that “we will continue to fight for Serbia.”
This is the SPS’s weakest electoral result since the start of the coalition with the Progressives, but it also demonstrates a trend of declining electoral support for the party. In the 2012 elections, the party had won nearly 570.000 votes, two years later just over 480.000, and in 2023 around 250.000 votes.
REMOVING A PART OF THE MEMBERSHIP
A section of the membership had expressed dissatisfaction with the way the SPS was being run. One of the most prominent figures in this group was Branko Ružić, until recently the vice-president of the SPS, who was unanimously expelled from the party at the end of August. As justification for the expulsion, the SPS stated that Ružić had violated the party’s statute “persistently and for a long period of time” and had not implemented the decisions of its bodies. Earlier, Ružić had been suspended from exercising his party functions, after he had publicly supported the student protests and had participated in some of the rallies. Ružić refused to speak to REL about the result achieved by his former party. A month and a half after Ružić’s expulsion, Boris Milićević, who had been a member of the Socialists for 16 years, also left the SPS.
Milićević, who was an advisor to Ružić when the latter was appointed minister without portfolio, responsible for European integration, in 2013, tells REL that he did not coordinate his decision to leave the party with Ružić. He sees the SPS’s poor performance as a result of the extremely high voter turnout, but also the fact that a part of the membership left the party on the eve of the elections. “This dissatisfaction erupted at that very moment. It was not a coordinated action, but, as that moment approached, the opposition to this anti-politics became increasingly greater and had to come to the surface,” says Milićević.
Milićević left the SPS in October, about two weeks before the parliamentary elections, at a time when public opinion polls showed that the Socialist Party of Serbia was struggling to pass the electoral threshold. He justified his decision in a post on Instagram, where he wrote that “the party chose to remain silent in the face of the violation of citizens’ human rights and the collapse of institutions.” He also criticized the fact that the SPS “chose anti-European politics and the glorification of a war criminal.” Asked why he left just two weeks before the elections from a party that has been in coalition with the Serbian Progressive Party since 2012, Milićević said that he had previously tried, through party channels, to draw attention to the wrong course the party had taken. “We had warned the party leadership in advance about the problematic policy it was pursuing, since December 2024 and January 2025, when the party’s then-current policy was discussed, which did not change,” he says. According to him, in response he received “either disregard, or some short negative responses.”
Milićević says that pre-election public opinion polls, which showed that the SPS would have difficulty passing the threshold, did not influence his decision to leave the party. “I did not make political calculations and, if I did, I tried to do it at a time when the consequences are greatest,” he says.
“LEADERSHIP DETACHED FROM THE PEOPLE”
Political scientist Radosavljevic believes that the departure of a part of the membership from the ranks of the Socialists did not affect the party’s such result. “Even without this, they would not have had the support. They found themselves on the wrong side of history at the moment when the wave of a movement, to put it poetically, liberation, began,” Radosavljevic assesses. According to him, the party leadership was “detached from the people, even from its own membership, let alone from the voters.”
REL’s interlocutor does not believe that the SPS will be able to return to political life in the upcoming elections. “This is a party that has completed its activity and I believe that it will dissolve itself. Maybe some younger members can establish a new party, which will not even refer to Dacic’s party in name,” says Radosavljevic. After leaving the SPS, Ružić announced that he was working on establishing a new party, emphasizing that he and the people who share the same beliefs with him “are not united by the party we left, but by the way we see the Serbia of the future.”
RELATIONS WITH RUSSIA
Since its founding, the SPS has cultivated close political ties with Russia. The party has developed cooperation with the ruling party in Russia, United Russia, while its leader, Dačić, has repeatedly emphasized the importance of Russian support for Serbia in the issue of non-recognition of Kosovo’s independence. The Socialists opposed the imposition of sanctions on Moscow after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, arguing that such an action would be contrary to Serbia’s state interests. SPS officials also maintain ties with Russia. Thus, in December 2023, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs awarded the deputy leader of the Socialists, Dušan Bajtović, the Order of the Russian Federation in Belgrade for his contribution to the development and strengthening of international relations. Bajtović has been at the head of the state-owned energy company “Srbijagas” for years, which depends on Russia for part of its activity, as it imports gas from there.
At the end of 2023, he appeared at an SPS pre-election rally wearing a red sports T-shirt with the capital Latin letter “Z”, a symbol of Russian aggression against Ukraine. Asked whether the SPS’s departure from Parliament would affect relations between Serbia and Russia, Radosavljević said that the party does not represent Serbia. “If Russia considers that SPS cadres should represent Serbia, then Moscow should reconsider its position. It is important that a new government is formed as soon as possible, while foreign relations should be built on mutual respect,” Radosavljević stressed. (RFE)