Aleksandar Vucic might have unintentionally found his campaign message, and it’s far from subtle: the European Union doesn’t want us. The Serbian president has been road-testing the claim for weeks now, but the death and funeral of Ratko Mladic have given it a stage no strategist could have built better.

Mladic died on August 27, aged 84, in The Hague, his final years spent serving a life sentence for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, atrocities the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia called “amongst the most heinous known to humankind”.

His body was flown home on a Serbian government plane. It lay in state at the Church of St Luke in Belgrade. On September 7, he was buried with military honours, his coffin wrapped in the Serbian flag, his officer’s cap and sabre resting on top, the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church presiding.

Vucic did not attend. His counterpart from Uzbekistan was visiting. It was a tidy piece of choreography: the coffin arrived in Belgrade on September 3, but the family “decided” the funeral would take place exactly on the day when Vucic couldn’t be there. But the president was represented anyway – by his son, and by cabinet ministers from Serbia’s ruling party.