Europeupdated 1h ago3 min read
Archive photo · 19 September 2006Serbia’s Student List Wins Absolute Majority as 50 Polling Centers Revote Sunday
“Foreign policy, however, presents a different set of challenges.”
“Serbia's students won the election, now comes the EU’s test !”
Photo: Michael Angelkovich, CC BY-SA 3.0 · Cropped for layout
This article is an automated aggregation of coverage from news outlets. Our editorials offer in-depth analysis curated by the NewsCord team.
Student List won parliamentary majority, ending fourteen years of SNS rule. Victory framed as move toward participatory politics and institutional reform.
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Serbia’s students win
Aleksandar Bulajic, a 25-year-old psychology student, walked through the electoral operations headquarters of the Student List in New Belgrade and showed a now-empty room where 50 students collected on Sunday, October 25, the results from Serbia's parliamentary elections in 500 polling stations. The Student List won an absolute majority with 141 seats, compared to 103 for Serbia United, the list led by President Aleksandar Vucic and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), with 99.4% of the stations counted and 50 centers scheduled for repetition on Sunday. Maksim Krumes, 22, a double bass student at the Belgrade Faculty of Music, said it would have been “irresponsible” to place himself on the list, adding “We have a lot to learn in life and we cannot govern a country.”
Boris Kojcinovic, 24, a Master’s student in Communications at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, explained by email from Novi Sad that “We ate and slept in those blocked faculties, from where we organized ourselves.” El País tied the movement’s momentum to the fall of the marquee at Novi Sad train station at 11:52 on November 1, 2024, and said after four months in a coma, 18-year-old Vukasin Crncevic died, the sixteenth victim.
EU test and foreign policy
Türkiye Today framed Serbia’s post-Vucic moment as a question of whether Belgrade would end his foreign policy, while Serbia formally kept EU membership as a strategic objective and refused to sanction Russia.
Marta Koswarnedon Oct. 28 that Serbia would struggle to advance toward membership without aligning with the bloc's foreign and security policy, including sanctions against Russia, and Türkiye Today described Moscow as important to Serbia's energy security.
In an Oct. 27 interview, lead candidate Ilija Srdanovic emphasized continued European integration and argued that foreign policy should be open to public debate rather than decided by one person.
The European Policy Centre said the Student List’s victory opens an opportunity for revitalising Serbia’s EU path, and it urged EU engagement to prioritize reforms in the fundamentals, supporting progress towards opening Cluster 3 and meeting interim benchmarks for Chapters 23 and 24.
The European Policy Centre also warned that “Foreign policy alignment and normalisation of relations with Kosovo remain membership criteria,” while noting that immediately bringing these topics to the centre of EU engagement is unlikely to produce results.
Revote, demands, and transition
Srpske.rs reported that election silence began at midnight and lasts until polls close on Sunday, November 1, at 8 pm, with a repeat vote from 7 am to 8 pm covering 24,438 voters at 53 polling stations. RIK President Vladimir Dimitrijevicsaid the vote for members of parliament is being repeated at polling stations where local electoral commissions ruled in their decisions that the results could not be determined, and srpske.rs said there were 31 such stations. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette said Serbia's student movement demanded the resignations of top officials in the police, intelligence agencies and the judiciary, and it quoted student Filip Ubovic saying, “Institutions belong to the citizens and the law applies to everyone.”
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette also said Vucic accused the election winners of “revolutionary terror” after groups of people stormed the Informer TV station. Jacobin described the student movement’s culmination as the Student List winning with over half of all votes and said the voter turnout reached 69 percent, up from 58.7 percent in 2023.