Serbian Autocrat Aleksandar Vucic Bites The Dust
Serbia’s student-led Students’ List has reportedly won an absolute majority in parliamentary elections, dealing a major setback to Aleksandar Vucic’s United Serbia coalition. The result follows protests after 16 people died in a 2024 railway-station canopy collapse and raises questions about democratic reform, rule of law and Serbia’s path towards EU membership.
Aleksandar Vucic faces a major political setback as Serbia’s student-led opposition reportedly secures a parliamentary majority | X
The current surge in democratic sentiment around the world has received a major boost, with voters in the Western Balkan state of Serbia handing a stinging rebuke in Sunday’s parliamentary elections to the 14-year rule of populist strongman Aleksandar Vucic.
In a calculated manoeuvre to retain his iron grip on power, the autocratic Vucic last month prematurely resigned as the country’s president—the Constitution stipulates a two-term limit for the high office—to contest the polls with an eye on returning as prime minister.
However, in a phenomenal turn of fortunes spurred by over 70 per cent voter turnout, the student-led opposition movement, the Students’ List, secured an absolute majority, with Vucic’s United Serbia coalition reduced to about 100 seats in the 250-strong unicameral legislature.
Signalling a historic break from the country’s recent past, the Socialist Party of Serbia, once led by its founder and former president Slobodan Milosevic—the dictator widely held responsible for the bloody breakup of former Yugoslavia and the deaths of over 100,000 people—fell short of the 3 per cent entry threshold to the National Assembly.
Student Movement Challenges Vucic’s Rule
The country’s youth was galvanised when 16 people were killed in 2024 after a canopy collapsed at a renovated railway station, fuelling suspicion of graft behind the crash.
Vucic, the broader target of the victorious student movement, was a one-time ultranationalist who, like many in his far-right ilk, opportunistically moderated his political stance ahead of his 2012 ascent to power, with an eye on Serbia’s European Union (EU) membership.
Vucic gained notoriety for a speech in Parliament, saying that for every Serb killed in the Bosnian War, 100 Bosnian Muslims must die. In defiance of EU strictures last month, he allowed a hero’s funeral in Belgrade for Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army commander and the first person in Europe since the Second World War to be convicted of genocide by the UN’s Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in the Netherlands in 2017.
Opposition Faces Challenge Of Governance
The ouster of the Serbian autocrat is sure to add momentum to protest movements in different countries, especially in Spain, where Prime Minister Sanchez has called a snap election on November 29, after mass protests over skyrocketing house prices brought thousands onto the streets last month.
While the transition in Belgrade has been greeted with enthusiasm in EU circles and elsewhere, the main challenge facing the victorious opposition would be to coalesce into a viable and durable governing coalition to restore the rule of law, transparency and accountability in the various national institutions.
Progress in these areas is precisely one of the main prerequisites for Serbia’s long-standing ambition for EU membership. Crucial to this goal would be defusing tensions with neighbouring Kosovo, also an EU aspirant, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008. Belgrade’s refusal to accord recognition to Pristina’s new status goes to the core of their bilateral dispute.
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