After Student List won the snap parliamentary elections on Sunday 25 October, congratulations poured in from across Europe. According to the latest estimates, they secured 135 to 140 of Serbian parliament’s 250 seats.
Student List, which emerged from the protest movement sparked by the 2024 Novi Sad railway station disaster, won a resounding electoral victory and ended former President Aleksandar Vučić’s 14-year dominance of national politics. Underlying the statements was satisfaction at the former President’s defeat, which could open a new chapter in relations between Belgrade and the EU.
“We stand ready to support reforms on the rule of law, media freedom, the fight against corruption and strong democratic institutions, and to work together to advance Serbia’s future in the European Union”, said European Council President António Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “A new chapter can begin for Serbia”, said European Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos.
The EU was absent from debates. Student List, a leaderless, horizontal movement, was focused throughout their campaign on domestic issues like the fight against corruption and Aleksandar Vučić’s style of governance, but avoided taking a position on closer ties with the EU.
“The main goal of the movement was to gather the maximum consensus possible to kick or to oust Vučić and the SNS”, Berta López Domènech, a political analyst at the European Policy Centre, told Agence Europe.
The EU could have been a divisive issue for their campaign. Mainly because “for many years there has been huge propaganda from the SNS and from the regime, anti-EU, in the national media”, said López Domènech, but also because the opposition is deeply bitter about the way the EU engaged with Mr Vučić. “The democratic opposition in Serbia […] expected much more from the EU and […] believed that the EU was helping Vučić to consolidate rather than driving democratic transformation in the country”, the analyst continued.
Rule of law reforms. The students’ programme, which promises a radical change in governance, does align with some EU priorities. Since a new methodology for accession negotiations was presented in February 2020 (see EUROPE 12419/2), the fundamentals, including respect for the rule of law, have been considered the driving force of the process.
“What has prevented Serbia from advancing since 2021 […] has been the lack of progress in the fundamentals”, explained Berta López Domènech. In its 2025 report, the Commission felt that Serbia had met the criteria for opening accession negotiation cluster 3, which covers competitiveness. This was blocked in November 2024 by several Member States, citing a lack of progress on criteria pertaining to rule of law (see EUROPE 13531/4).
For Adnan Ćerimagić, an analyst at the European Stability Initiative, the new government’s arrival offers the EU an opportunity it needs to seize. “The important thing is that the EU has an opening it can build on”, he explained. But the Student List will need to agree on its position. “If one would do an interview with five members of the parliament now elected on the Student List, we would get different answers from them on these questions”, he says. (Original version in French by Louis Dubar)