The man tipped to become Serbia’s next president says he has undergone a transformation from the hardline nationalist who once enforced censorship for Slobodan Milošević, contradicting opposition accusations that he is a power-hungry autocrat with authoritarian tendencies.

Aleksandar Vučić, the Serbian prime minister, said his personal conversion mirrored a change in the Balkan country, which he insisted no longer aspired to be a major actor on the global stage since its key role in the devastating 1990s conflicts that accompanied the violent breakup of Yugoslavia.

Vučić, 47, is the overwhelming frontrunner among 11 candidates contesting Sunday’s presidential election – with some polls indicating he may win more than 50% in the first round, precluding the need for a run-off ballot.

Victory would cement his already unquestioned position as Serbia’s most powerful politician, equally feted and respected by western European leaders such as Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, and by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, both of whom hosted him this month.

However, critics are worried Vučić could become too powerful, at a time when he already effectively dominates the most important state institutions, leading to freedoms in Serbia’s fledgling democracy being eroded.

They point to his role as communications minister under Milošević – the late Serbian strongman president who died while being tried for war crimes – when he fined newspapers for breaking draconian censorship regulations during the 1999 conflict with Nato over Kosovo, and presided over a diet of state broadcast propaganda.

Sitting in an ornate meeting room across the street from the former army headquarters still in ruins from the Nato bombing, Vučić said such criticisms failed to take account of how he had changed.

“There’s an idiom in Serbian – that only donkeys don’t change,” Vučić said, speaking in fluent English, perfected while working for a year in the UK. “It’s very normal to change your views. It’s very normal to change yourself, that you become more mature, more responsible.

“When you have to pay every single month 2.5 million pensioners and public service workers, it’s not always easy. But when I have all this in mind, then you see that your most important [responsibility] is to speak about stability.”

Vučić made his political reputation as a member of the far-right Radical party, which campaigned for a Greater Serbia and supported the bloody wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, which cost an estimated 100,000 lives and left some of Serbia’s leading politicians accused of facilitating ethnic cleansing.

He left in 2008 to join the Serbian Progressive party (SNS) formed by his mentor Tomislav Nikolić, the current president, who is not standing in Sunday’s poll.

Analysts say Vučić’s decision to seek the presidency – which is nominally ceremonial and constitutionally less powerful than the premier’s office – was driven by polls suggesting Nikolić would lose, an outcome that could have threatened Vučić’s political dominance.

His plan, some claim, is to govern from the presidency while installing a puppet figure in the prime minister’s position. Vučić was elected Serbia’s prime minister in 2014 and re-elected in 2016 with a reduced majority, although opinion polls show strong public backing for his stated goal of pushing Serbia’s bid to join the European Union, which he says is now his country’s top strategic goal.

Critics say Vučić has won European backing by playing along with an EU-sponsored dialogue over Kosovo while continuing to act in a more authoritarian manner domestically and drawing ever closer to Russia.

“The EU is making a big mistake in Serbia,” said Boško Jakšić, a veteran columnist with the Politika newspaper. “They are selfishly interested in Kosovo and not in the quality of social and political life here. So Vučić is their darling because he supports the Brussels dialogue. But they don’t care about what he does in his own country – and that’s playing into Russia’s hands.”

Posters of Aleksandar Vučić in Novi Sad, Serbia. Photograph: Marko Djurica/Reuters

Addressing the charges of autocracy, Vučić said: “That’s my way of democracy. Because they can always express their attitude, they can always say that I’m authoritarian, autocratic, or whatever they want. But I go to the parliament more often than any other prime minister to reply to their questions, have discussions with them. It’s a very open society and I have no problem to hear those comments.”

He insisted that his former pro-nationalist views had changed, something he claimed had helped to win over the Serbian public. “These ideas were wrong … my views, many things [have changed],” he said.



His priority now is to woo inward investment and create economic stability for Serbia, a country of 7.2 million people, blighted by high unemployment and lagging living standards and which he said had also changed.

“Serbia in the 1990s wanted to be a huge actor on the global political scene. Serbia today doesn’t want to be that,” he said.

True to these more limited objectives, Vučić rebuffed suggestions that Serbia could act as an intermediary between the EU and Russia, which has played a highly visible role in the election, with nearly all the candidates voicing pro-Moscow sentiments.

“I have no such dreams,” he said. “There have always been some people in Serbia that were thinking they were kind of messiahs or something. I’m not that type of a guy. I’m a guy that will always deal with concrete things, which means how to get better living standards for our ordinary people. Not dreaming big dreams of foreign policy.”

Yet the ubiquitous presence of massive election posters showing Vučić’s youthful, bespectacled features smiling beside his name – written in Cyrillic – and initials in the Latin script belie his protestations of modesty.

Pro-Vučić election adverts massively outnumber those of all other candidates combined, owing to his superior electoral funding – a disparity legally justified by the Progressive party’s status as the biggest parliamentary grouping.

Vučić is already comparing himself to Tito in public works – railways, highways, opening factories, etc Mihailo Crnobrnja, European Movement of Serbia

“He is not a true democrat but an auto-democrat, meaning democracy has to serve his interests,” said Mihailo Crnobrnja, president of the European Movement of Serbia and a former minister in Milošević’s government before the wars of the 1990s.

“What he would most like is to become another Tito [the dictator of communist-era Yugoslavia],” Crnobrnja said. “He’s already comparing himself to Tito, not in political achievement but in public works, railways, highways, opening factories, etc.”

And despite his public rejection of international status, television commercials and election rallies play up Vučić’s ties with Merkel, Putin and other world leaders. At a mass rally in the central Serb city of Kragujevac on Wednesday, Sergei Zheleznyak, general secretary of Putin’s United Russia party, told the crowd that the Russian president was endorsing Vučić, earning warm applause.

The backing of foreign statesmen and women has triggered accusations that Vučić is using the privileges of the prime minister’s office for campaign purposes – leaving other candidates, such as the Vuk Jeremić, a former foreign minister, and Saša Janković, lagging behind in the polls.

Student and presidential candidate Luka Maksimović. Photograph: Marko Djurica/Reuters

In the absence of serious competition, attention has focused on 25-year-old Luka Maksimović, a communications student and novelty candidate who has campaigned as his alter ego, Ljubiša Preletačević Beli, and openly ridicules politicians with an endless series of outlandish and mock election pledges while wearing a garish white suit that evokes comparisons to Tito.

Despite having turned down £258,000 of state election funds, some surveys show Maksimović in second place with around 11% of the vote, with signs that his outrageous persona is popular with young voters. Among his promises are that Kosovo – lauded by nationalist politicians as the “heart and soul” of Serbia – will beg to come back if he is elected.

“This is a social experiment. We wanted to show those in power that the young generation is not sleeping but they have forgotten about us,” he told the Guardian. “It’s a joke, but a serious joke. Serbia is a plutocracy and humour is the best way to fight this. Serbia needs revitalisation.”

The campaign has drawn comparisons to the Italian comedian-politician Beppe Grillo, whose Five Star movement has emerged as a political force. But analysts warn that its popularity risks taking votes from serious anti-Vučić candidates, thus further weakening the opposition.

Vučić with the Russian president Vladimir Putin. Photograph: Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images

• This article was amended on 31 March 2017. An earlier version said Slobodan Milošević was convicted of war crimes; he died while on trial.