This is not simply a change of government. It is the collapse of a political order that has defined Serbia since 2012.
Serbia’s elections have produced a result that will almost certainly be remembered as one of the biggest political turning points in the country’s modern history. The Student List has won a landslide victory and, with 140 of the 250 seats in parliament, secured an outright majority. The Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), until now the country’s dominant political force, has won 104 seats and, for the first time in almost 14 years, is heading into opposition.
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Since the Serbian Progressive Party came to power, Aleksandar Vučić and his political bloc have exercised almost complete dominance over Serbia’s political life. The SNS controlled the executive branch, enjoyed large parliamentary majorities, dominated local politics and, through an extensive network of political and institutional alliances, largely determined the boundaries of political competition in the country. For more than a decade, opposition parties repeatedly tried to break that dominance, but without success.
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The Student List has transformed itself from a movement born out of months of student protests into the country’s dominant political force, turning what began as a social revolt into electoral legitimacy. In doing so, the student movement has achieved what Serbia’s traditional opposition parties failed to accomplish for more than a decade: it has directly broken Aleksandar Vučić’s political monopoly.
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‘So let’s all of us commit to stopping the sleep-walking into a new form of Nazism and by acting together, in unity, we can challenge their narrative’
