The opposition Student List’s landslide victory on Sunday ended Aleksandar Vučić’s 12-year run as the EU’s key interlocutor in Serbia. For more than a decade, every step of the candidate country’s accession process and trade negotiations had to pass through him. When POLITICO reached him, Gašić was in the middle of grading student papers — a fitting snapshot of a new parliamentary majority made up largely of professors, doctors and other political novices.
The Student List won an outright parliamentary majority at the weekend: a stunning result for a leaderless movement born out of protests. The party’s first order of business will be undoing much the legacy of Vučić and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), starting with reversing years of rule-of-law rollbacks. But it will also reset Serbia’s relationship with Brussels, which the Student List argues the former leader managed more as a transactional tool than a genuine path to EU membership.
Representatives for the SNS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Even among Serbia’s most committed pro-Europeans, Brussels’ willingness to route all progress through Vučić personally has left a bitter aftertaste. According to CEP data published earlier this year, as many 41.6% of citizens believe the EU is more interested in pursuing its own political and economic interests in the region than improving the state of democracy and the rule of law in the country.
For years, anytime non-governmental organizations, journalists or activists argued that Brussels should try to include other voices in the EU negotiation process, they were told “that there was no alternative to the regime in Serbia,” Majstorović continued. The Student List’s election program casts the EU as Serbia’s most important economic partner and pledged to deepen Belgrade’s existing strategic partnerships with EU members such as Greece, Italy, Hungary and France, while seeking closer bilateral ties with other European capitals. It does not, however, explicitly name EU membership as an immediate goal.
Gašić wouldn’t be drawn on concrete aims for the Serbia-EU relationship, but said: “We don’t want to be cut off by Europe. We don’t want to be an isolated island.” “I respect how well-ordered they are, the rule of law and democratic principles,” he added. A one-sided approach doesn’t foster long-term cooperation.” The Student List grew out of a mass protest movement sparked by a 2024 railway station roof collapse that killed 16 people.
Students blamed the deaths on corruption in state construction contracts and began blockading universities, and within months the protests had swelled into the largest Serbia had seen in decades. Brussels’ response was muted as students marched across the country, with EU officials largely avoided criticizing Vučić directly. EU flags were conspicuously absent from the demonstrations.
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