Serbia's Student List Launches Government Formation Talks After Election Win
Serbia's Student List is preparing talks on forming a government after winning 53% of the vote and 141 of 250 parliamentary seats in the country's election, and its candidates say their first task will be dismantling the legacy of Aleksandar Vučić's 14-year rule.
Serbia's Student List Launches Government Formation Talks After Election Win
What the projected results show
The Student List's win is decisive by any measure. Projected results compiled by the Centre for Free Elections and Democracy in Belgrade, based on 100% of ballot samples counted, put the movement on 53% of the vote and 141 seats in the 250-member parliament.
- Vučić conceded defeat late on Sunday, bringing his domination of Serb politics to an abrupt end
- His Serbian Progressive party (SNS) took 39% of the vote, or 103 seats
- The remaining seats went to national minority party lists
A government without a prime minister yet
Who will lead the next cabinet is an open question. The movement is deliberately leaderless, with no hierarchy and no government experience, making its choice of prime minister unclear. Its candidates included academics, actors and farmers as well as students, and its prominent figures include Ilija Srdanović, the cardiologist who headed the candidate list, Dejan Šoškić, a former central bank governor, and Radomir Saičić, the Belgrade University chemistry professor who spoke on behalf of the List after the win.
Analysts pointed to the pace of the movement's decision-making as a test ahead. Nikola Burazer of the Centre for Contemporary Politics noted that its process for choosing candidates "actually took a long time – months", and said that once the celebrations end, "we will focus a bit more on what's coming up, and how the government will look".
The agenda the candidates set
Ana Mirković, a university educationalist, psychologist and Student List candidate, said everyone in the movement understood the weight of the responsibility before it. She framed the result not as a prize but as an obligation:
We do not see the election result as gaining power and privileges, but as taking on a historic debt to our own people.
Mirković said the movement's first priority was "the social and psychological detoxification" of the country. The platform's pledges centre on corruption and the rule of law:
- an independent police unit accountable to prosecutors rather than the interior ministry, and a purge of officers linked to organised crime
- a ban on party-loyalist appointments to state-owned companies
- scrutiny of all major state infrastructure contracts by new independent bodies
- urgent opening of the media, an end to pressure on public-sector workers and a stop to institutional violence, dismantling what Mirković called a "system of intimidation"
Mirković said the aim was to "rebuild society from the ground up", through full disclosure of all contracts and financial flows, depoliticising and strengthening the judiciary, and renewing education and healthcare, so that state capture cannot happen again. The List deliberately kept divisive foreign policy questions - including relations with the EU and Russia - in the background during the campaign.
Deadlines and international reaction
The constitution sets a tight timetable: the new parliament must convene within 30 days of the official election result, and a government must be formed within 90 days after that. A further vote looms behind it - Serbia must hold new presidential elections before 27 December, because Vučić stepped down from the presidency to run for prime minister.
Reactions from abroad came quickly:
- The Kremlin said on Monday it hoped the new leaders "understand that cooperation with Russia is in Serbia's interests"
- Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the result "clearly a new chapter in the history of the country and its people", and thanked Serbia for respecting Ukraine's people, state and independence
- German chancellor Friedrich Merz said Berlin would "actively support Serbia's European path", adding that the students' demands for rule of law and fighting corruption had reached the people
Vučić, for his part, blamed his party's defeat on "the direct support of various European countries and the US deep state".
