Serbia’s Victorious New Democrats Face an Old Question, by Jasmin Mujanović – 27 October 2026

From New Lines Magazine

The would-be democrats of Serbia’s Student List find themselves in a complex situation: Their aspirations to remake the country’s political order depend, in part, on the support of some of the region’s most reactionary elements.

For the second time in just over a quarter-century, Serbia has seemingly thrown off the yoke of one-man rule.

In October 2000, Serbians mobilized — first at the ballot box, then in the streets — to oust the genocidal regime of Slobodan Milošević. In October 2026, it was sufficient for them merely to vote in overwhelming numbers to force the concession of the strongman at the helm. This time Serbians ousted Milošević’s protégé, Aleksandar Vučić, and his ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) after their nearly 14-year tenure in government.

The vote capped two years of protest that began in November 2024, when a newly renovated canopy at Novi Sad’s railway station collapsed, killing 16 people. An insurgent student movement blamed the deaths on government corruption, which they saw as a hallmark of Vučić’s rule, and their ensuing blockades of universities grew into the largest protest movement in Serbia since 2000. The movement eventually coalesced into the so-called Student List parliamentary coalition. On Sunday, this bloc won 53% of the popular vote and secured around 140 seats in the country’s 250-seat National Assembly, providing it with a comfortable, stable governing majority.

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Jasmin Mujanović is a political scientist and the author of two books: ‘Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans’ and ‘The Bosniaks: Nationhood After Genocide’.

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