Serbia, the Students' List ends 14 years of Vucic's power

The Students’ List has won the parliamentary elections in Serbia, completing a transformation that until a few years ago seemed unthinkable: from a protest movement born in universities to the country’s leading political force. This is reported concordantly by Euronews and the EUnews portal, two independent sources that confirm the same picture of preliminary results.

According to this data, the Students’ List is expected to obtain between 135 and 140 seats out of a total of 250, a clear majority sufficient on its own to form the new government without the need for complex alliances with other parliamentary forces. It is a margin that leaves little doubt about the direction of the vote, unlike what is happening on the same day in other consultations around the world.

Perhaps the most significant figure of the Serbian election day concerns participation: voter turnout stood at around 64.9%, the highest recorded since Serbia’s independence from the former Yugoslavia. A number that reveals, even before the seats, the scale of the mobilization surrounding these early elections.

Certifying the turnaround was the defeated opponent himself. Aleksandar Vucic, who had led the Serbian Progressive Party for fourteen years in power, acknowledged his party’s defeat immediately after the polls closed. “I recognize the students’ victory,” the former president declared, in remarks that unambiguously close a political phase that had opened over a decade ago.

The shift from the streets to the institutions achieved by the Students’ List marks an unusual precedent in the landscape of European protest movements: rarely does a mobilization born outside traditional parties manage to transform, within the span of a single electoral round, into a self-sufficient parliamentary majority. The margin of 135-140 seats out of 250 indicated by the preliminary results clearly exceeds the absolute majority threshold, giving the new governing force ample room for maneuver in forming the executive.

It remains to be seen, in the coming weeks, how the Students’ List will translate into government a majority born from a street mobilization rather than from a consolidated party apparatus: a transition that the final results, expected in the coming days, will help clarify in their numerical details.