Foreign Affairs Serbia’s Political Tsunami Won’t Bring Geopolitical Transformation Belgrade will continue to balance Western and non-Western partnerships. Photo by Andrej Ivanov/Getty Images Serbia’s recent high-stakes parliamentary elections produced nothing short of a political earthquake.
The student-led opposition—the Student List—achieved a monumental victory on October 25, securing roughly 53 percent of the vote to defeat Aleksandar Vučić and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). This election will go down in history as a case of successful public mobilization, which suddenly ended SNS’s 14 years of political dominance.
Following nearly two years of student-led protests in response to the collapsed railway station canopy in Serbia’s second largest city, Novi Sad, the issues driving the opposition pertained mostly to domestic politics: state capture, democratic erosion, corruption, institutional failures, and cronyism.
The foreign policy implications are not straightforward, but su