In an exclusive interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Florian Bieber, Professor of Southeast European History and Politics at the University of Graz, warns that Serbia’s democratic breakthrough risks repeating the failures of its post-2000 transition unless entrenched authoritarian networks are dismantled. Following the Students’ List’s electoral defeat of Aleksandar Vučić, Professor Bieber emphasizes the need to restore judicial independence, reform security structures, establish genuine media pluralism, and prevent socioeconomic exclusion. Drawing parallels with the aftermath of Slobodan Milošević’s overthrow, he argues that electoral victory alone cannot guarantee democratic consolidation. The challenge, he stresses, is to transform student-led civic mobilization into durable democratic institutions while ensuring that supporters of the defeated regime are not politically marginalized.
Interview by Selcuk Gultasli*
Serbia stands at a historic turning point. Following nearly two years of student-led protests against corruption, institutional capture, and Aleksandar Vučić’s personalized authoritarianism, the Students’ List secured a parliamentary majority in October 2026. Yet electoral victory raises fundamental questions about dismantling entrenched clientelist networks, restoring democratic institutions, and sustaining inclusive civic mobilization. Serbia’s experience also offers broader insights into the vulnerabilities of competitive authoritarian regimes.
In an in-depth interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Florian Bieber, Professor of Southeast European History and Politics at the University of Graz and Director of its Centre for Southeast European Studies, examines Serbia’s democratic breakthrough through the historical failures of its post-Milošević transition. His central warning is that removing an authoritarian incumbent does not necessarily dismantle the structures that sustained authoritarian rule.
Reflecting on October 2000, Professor Bieber recalls that Serbia never experienced a decisive institutional rupture: “Many of the power holders from the previous regime managed to survive through these negotiations.” The failure to investigate entrenched political, security, and business networks enabled their continued influence and ultimately facilitated democratic reversal. He therefore emphasizes that “this kind of rupture with the previous institutional structures is critical.”
The Students’ List, Professor Bieber argues, now enjoys an important advantage: “It won an outright majority and did not have to make compromises to win the elections.” Unlike established parties, it carries fewer inherited political obligations. Nevertheless, reforming captured institutions remains exceptionally difficult. He identifies the judiciary as perhaps the greatest challenge, stressing the importance of “ensuring that it remains vigilant and that nobody is above the law.”Security structures, patronage networks, and politically dependent media present equally consequential obstacles.
Professor Bieber also warns against repeating the socioeconomic exclusions that undermined democratization after 2000. Citizens who experienced unemployment, poverty, and disillusionment became receptive to renewed authoritarian politics. Accordingly, he argues that those who supported Vučić’s Progressive Party must not be forgotten but instead “brought on board,” lest they become the constituency for another authoritarian resurgence.
Beyond institutional reform, the interview explores the students’ innovative horizontal organization, cross-ethnic solidarity, and prospects for European integration. Professor Bieber highlights their insistence that “We want institutions; we don’t want individuals,” while questioning how participatory practices can coexist with effective representative government.
Ultimately, Serbia’s experience offers lessons extending beyond the Western Balkans. As Professor Bieber observes, “There is no single path out of competitive authoritarian regimes.” What successful transitions share, however, is ideologically broad coalitions and sustained civic mobilization. The challenge now is transforming electoral victory into durable democratic institutions without reproducing the political exclusions and structural vulnerabilities of the past.
Here is our interview with Professor Florian Bieber, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Even Consolidated Authoritarian Regimes Can Be Outmaneuvered by Civic Movements
Professor Bieber, thank you for joining us. In your influential study, Patterns of Competitive Authoritarianism in the Western Balkans, you identify the structural foundations of authoritarian resilience. How does the Students’ List’s October 25 victory challenge your earlier explanation of Vučić’s political dominance, and which vulnerabilities ultimately proved decisive?
Professor Florian Bieber: The regime’s defeat at the ballot box in October came, of course, after not only two years of massive student mobilization and the wider social movement the students created, but also eight years of previous protests. Dissatisfaction had therefore been growing for a long time and was very deeply rooted. In that sense, there had been a great deal of social mobilization. Still, the regime had governed for 14 years, which is a very long period of time, and had been quite consolidated.
What were its main weaknesses? I guess the weakness of any regime, especially a competitive authoritarian regime, is that despite its attempts to control the entire society, including the media and institutions, it can be outmaneuvered by a movement that organizes in parallel to these control mechanisms. What you realize is that despite the seemingly complete control of society, there are always other channels for reaching out to citizens. This is something the student movement used very effectively.
Perhaps this shows that even under a seemingly very consolidated regime, the ability to mobilize is critical. Again, the students did so not just through social media but also by literally traveling to places around the country and talking directly to citizens. This, of course, was a means of communication that the regime could not control so easily.
And I think it was the level of corruption that really weakened the regime in the end. The regime was seemingly so corrupt that citizens felt, in a certain way, humiliated by it. This sense of humiliation was really captured in the anger and social mobilization over the last two years, and it was critical to weakening the regime in the elections.
Serbia’s Students Mobilized the Voters Traditional Opposition Parties Could Not Reach
Vučić combined electoral competition with media manipulation, clientelism, nationalist mobilization, and institutional capture. Was his defeat primarily the result of accumulated governance failures, the erosion of regime legitimacy, or the emergence of an opposition movement capable of overcoming structural electoral disadvantages?
Professor Florian Bieber: The frustration had been there for a long time. Voter turnout had been low in previous elections, so much of the frustration that had been growing over the years remained untapped. In a certain way, the answer is both. Frustration and structural weaknesses had accumulated, but without an effective movement to capture that frustration, this could have continued for a while. Regimes can exist with high levels of frustration and opposition as long as the opposition remains fragmented.
So, it was really critical to have an ideologically diverse movement capable of incorporating people from very different standpoints in a way that opposition parties had never been able to do. The movement was also able to overcome the structural reservations toward established political parties.
There is a deeply rooted sense of distrust in political parties, which partly has to do with the experience of political parties in post-communist or post-socialist Serbia and the wider region, as well as the way opposition parties were continuously maligned by the regime. All of this made opposition parties unable, and to some degree unwilling, to become effective translators of frustration. Their own fragmentation and inability to form effective coalitions also contributed to this ineffectiveness.
Already in 2023, there was a massive protest movement, and the opposition united but was still able to capture only a relatively small percentage of the overall frustration that was present. This was because they were unable to mobilize non-voters. Turnout was approximately 15% lower than it is now. It was these non-voters whom the student movement managed to attract—people who had been largely passive and had stopped participating in elections.
This is really critical: high turnout and the ability to mobilize people. This is what the movement achieved through a combination of get-out-the-vote campaigns across the country, an ideologically broad coalition, and the advantage of not being tainted by previous political engagement.
In your October 2026 analysis, Serbian Elections on a Tightrope, you highlighted the SNS’s shrinking alliances and increasingly defensive electoral strategy. Does the defeat represent the collapse of Vučić’s personalized political project, or could its institutional and clientelist networks survive the loss of parliamentary power?
Professor Florian Bieber: Yes, I think this is critical. As you mentioned, we saw before the elections that some of the regime’s allies had already declined in power. In the end, the Socialist Party, which had been a key ally of Vučić’s Progressive Party throughout their time in power, failed to enter Parliament for the first time ever. So, there was already a degree of erosion, which accelerated after the elections. We are now seeing a number of arrests and people switching sides.
A lot of this is about perception. On election eve, Vučić himself announced that he expected the Students’ List to be chaotic and believed he could return to power within a few months. That is, of course, wishful thinking on his part. But much depends on how far the Students’ List is able to transform the country and whether the power structure consequently crumbles or the new administration is perceived as ineffective, allowing Vučić to preserve his influence.
Early indications, even before the Students’ List actually takes over, suggest that the dynamics favor the Students’ List. The power pyramid is crumbling because many people participated in it for opportunistic reasons. Now that this motivation is gone, they are switching their allegiances. Many institutions in Serbia have also become active, partly because they now can. There are genuine professionals who feel they can do their work without being disrupted, while others are trying, in a certain way, to curry favor with the incoming administration and are acting accordingly.
All of this points to the crumbling of Vučić’s power structures. The arrests also suggest that people around him are coming under pressure from institutions even before the Students’ List takes over.
From that perspective, the current dynamics suggest a collapse, though perhaps not a complete collapse of the party, because an ultranationalist core might remain. This is also an ideological question. The Progressive Party was on the nationalist right, but it was also a kind of catch-all party. Will it now have to refocus on its core electorate, which is more conservative, nationalist, and anti-Western, while also trying to capture voters who might become dissatisfied with the new government’s performance in the future?
So, there is both an ideological and a structural question. But based on current developments, I would expect the power pyramid to continue collapsing, or at least to shrink substantially.
Your research with Lura Pollozhani emphasizes the importance of mass protests in challenging competitive authoritarianism. What distinguished Serbia’s student-led mobilization from earlier unsuccessful protest waves, and how did it transform widespread dissatisfaction into a decisive electoral majority?
Professor Florian Bieber: We have seen a pattern throughout the region in which social movements are critical to breaking competitive authoritarian patterns. We saw this in North Macedonia and Montenegro, and now we are seeing it in Serbia as well. Somebody writing about Bulgaria referred to a “protest democracy,” in which protests and social movements are an intrinsic part of the political system, serving as a corrective to prevent it from becoming competitive authoritarian.
In the Western Balkans, social movements are necessary for restoring this, but the critical step, of course, is translating social movements into political actors. In Montenegro, protests were directly channeled into multiple political parties. In North Macedonia, one political party in 2015 was the main actor that captured the social movement. In Serbia, smaller political movements had emerged from various protests over the past decades, but these movements were usually too narrow ideologically to capture a broad movement and attract a broad vote.
What happened here was that the social movement directly transformed itself into a political movement, as we saw when the students decided to run. They did so in a strategically smart way by not forming a political party but maintaining the movement element. They even registered as a list of citizens rather than as a party, preserving the integrity of the movement in their candidacy. By not running themselves but instead selecting experts or respected citizens, they also signaled that it was not about their own political power.
So, in a certain way, the conversion of social movements into political agents is critical. Of course, the path taken by Serbia’s social movement to become a political actor is perhaps rather unusual. In most other countries, we see these social movements transform into political parties, either multiple parties or one party that carries the movement’s legitimacy.
But as I noted earlier, political parties in Serbia had lost their credibility and, as a result, were unable to become those carriers. This required the student movement to opt for a rather innovative structure, which also had a basic democratic element built into it.
Serbia’s students relied on university plenums, horizontal organization, nonviolent resistance, and grassroots networks rather than charismatic leadership. Did these practices create a genuinely alternative model of democratic mobilization, or were their advantages primarily strategic under authoritarian conditions?
Professor Florian Bieber: This basic democratic organization was mostly driven by pragmatic considerations. The student movement was not ideological. It was heterogeneous in terms of its ideology but also, in a certain way, not revolutionary. The students became political through the protests. They learned by doing.
The plenums, as a form of basic democratic decision-making, were more of a pragmatic response to the fact that student parliaments at the universities had also been captured by the ruling party. The existing formal institutions were therefore not available, and the students needed to find creative alternatives for organizing.
Basic democracy was thus more of a pragmatic choice, and this turned out to be, intuitively, a very effective one, despite the difficulties in decision-making, including sometimes very lengthy decision-making processes, and the lack of clearly identifiable spokespeople for the movement. First of all, it meant that the student movement was able to build a coalition in which everybody was included, something that a smaller group of leaders would not have been able to achieve.
Of course, not having leaders and announcing the list of candidates only when the elections were announced meant that individuals were less likely to be targeted than they would have been if the movement had had visible faces who could be targeted by the regime, co-opted, blackmailed, or otherwise pressured. This was a deliberate choice precisely to prevent such risks for individuals who would otherwise have been in a very dangerous position.
So much of it was pragmatic, but it also brought with it, of course, a different vision of politics. This may not amount to an ideology, but the movement was certainly very explicit in saying, “We want institutions to work.” It was not about strong leaders.
The leading slogan, at least initially, was directed toward former President Vučić: “It’s not your competence.” When he was basically in charge of everything, even though constitutionally he was not, the students were saying, “We want institutions; we don’t want individuals.” This strong emphasis on the responsibility of institutions was also more credible because, again, it was not a leadership-driven movement.
In a certain way, these different elements aligned and worked in the student movement’s favor because they all appeared to constitute a credible and strategically functional response to the setting in which the movement operated.
Your comparative research with Claudia Laštro demonstrates that opposition cohesion and extra-institutional mobilization are crucial to defeating competitive authoritarian incumbents. How did Serbia’s students overcome the fragmentation of traditional opposition parties, and what lessons emerge from Montenegro’s 2020 and North Macedonia’s 2017 transitions?
Professor Florian Bieber: In Montenegro, the strategy in 2020 was to bring together three coalitions of opposition parties that had ideological differences but agreed to cooperate and not attack each other, as they had done previously. In North Macedonia, social movements and the main social democratic opposition party were able to form a temporary coalition.
In Serbia, however, what we saw was that the students deliberately sidelined all existing political parties. Some parties chose to support the Students’ List. Several key parties, some long-established and others that had themselves emerged from social movements, basically put their party infrastructure at the disposal of the students but did not run themselves. Two coalitions of opposition parties did run in the elections, but they misjudged the political atmosphere. At that point, the atmosphere was so referendum-like that voters faced a clear choice: either support the regime or the Students’ List. There was really no third option.
Those lists performed extremely poorly, receiving less than 1% of the vote, far worse than their previous showing. This was partly because people punished them for not aligning with the students and partly because voters did not want to waste their votes, fearing that these parties would not meet the electoral threshold. So there was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in all of this.
In a certain way, the students’ strategy of not cooperating with existing parties or building a coalition of parties was certainly high-risk. I remember talking to both opposition party leaders and student activists in the run-up to the elections, even before they were announced, and many were quite critical of that choice. The students were often almost confrontational toward the opposition parties, rejecting them.
The opposition parties were taken aback, saying, “We’ve been campaigning, we’ve been active for years, and now you’re rejecting us. Isn’t that a little bit unfair? You’re treating us as if we’re the regime, even though we have been targeted and victimized by that regime over the years.” So that decision certainly had its problems. But it also meant that the Students’ List could remain above the internal divisions among opposition parties and, as a result, forge a new type of coalition.
Certainly, the Students’ List is itself a coalition. Among its candidates, there are clearly identifiable figures positioning themselves as more conservative, perhaps even nationalist, while others are certainly more liberal. But by not forming a coalition through existing structures and instead building one through individual candidates and the plenum structure, this ideological pluralism was not tainted by the institutional legacies that had made cooperation so difficult.
The Novi Sad railway station tragedy transformed corruption and institutional negligence into powerful sources of collective indignation. Why did this particular event generate sustained nationwide resistance when earlier scandals and protests failed to produce comparable political change?
Professor Florian Bieber: That is a very critical question because, while it was a tragedy, it certainly was not the first or the only trigger point. I think several factors came together. First of all, people died in a very visible way. The previous year, there had been two mass shootings, but mass shootings also occur elsewhere. While you can hold the government responsible for fostering a culture of violence, those shootings did not link the government as directly to the victims.
Previous incidents had also generated considerable anger, such as the lithium mining project in western Serbia and earlier violence against opposition candidates. But here, individual citizens died in an accident that seemed preventable because it occurred in connection with a key government project in which the government had clearly been negligent.
So it was this clarity that helped: the fact that it linked individuals’ fates to the larger issues of corruption and the rule of law. The rule of law and democracy are very abstract concepts, and it is difficult to mobilize people around them. Here, however, there was an individual tragedy, and a key element of the protests became 16 minutes of silence. Initially, the period of silence was shorter, but as the number of victims increased to 16, it became 16 minutes. This was a very powerful symbol. Joint mourning became a central motif with tremendous emotional power, and this gave the movement strength.
But this is only part of the story. The other part is the previously accumulated frustration and the many earlier social movements that found their way into this protest movement. There were people who had protested against lithium mining and others who had been active in previous protests. All these activists and movements joined forces around the railway station collapse and the tragedy that killed 16 people.
The students then became active, not immediately after the tragedy but several weeks later, when students mourning on a street were beaten up by individuals who turned out to be local politicians from the ruling party. It was the indignation over this violence against people who were silently mourning that really mattered. Because the victims of this violence were students, solidarity developed among fellow students and through their networks. Some of these students were also prominent and well-known, creating a dynamic in which the protests spread like wildfire.
When I spoke with students involved in the movement, they told me that it was really this violence against fellow students that mobilized them. Of course, the tragedy provided the background, but the tipping point was this experience of violence, when they said, “We don’t tolerate being beaten up by thugs, basically.” That was what really pushed people forward.
Then, of course, once students began taking over the universities, a kind of self-mobilization emerged. What we saw was a mutually reinforcing dynamic, especially among students, which then extended beyond the student movement itself. It was this dynamic, going well beyond the individual tragedy, that ultimately triggered the mass mobilization.
Your scholarship on ethno-populism examines how nationalist leaders construct political legitimacy through exclusionary representations of the people. Does the Students’ List embody an inclusive democratic alternative to Vučić’s ethnonational populism, or could its anti-establishment rhetoric eventually reproduce a different form of populist majoritarianism?
Professor Florian Bieber: Indeed, the answer could be both, or either. There are very strong signs that the student movement is trying to overcome the ethnonationalist logic of the regime. It did so in multiple ways. First, the students were accused early on of being foreign agents or being controlled by external actors, part of the classical repertoire of autocrats. They defended themselves by using the Serbian flag as a central symbol. In a way, they claimed the state’s flag for themselves.
This is something earlier protest movements had not done because most had emerged from politically and ideologically more left-wing environmentalist movements, which did not see the flag as a particularly powerful symbol for themselves. By using the flag, the students, in a certain way, reinterpreted its meaning. It no longer represented state power and nationalist rhetoric but rather a demand for accountability and functioning institutions.
The other approach was to deliberately include national minorities in their movement, and these minorities actively participated. The most prominent example was the highly visible inclusion of Bosniaks, who are mostly Muslim, from the Sandžak region in southwestern Serbia. Bosniak students participated in the protests and university blockades, and there were many prominent and highly visible acts of solidarity.
For example, Muslim and Serbian Orthodox students jointly broke the fast during Ramadan, something that had rarely been seen so prominently outside the region. Similarly, when the student movement blocked the state broadcaster over Easter, Muslim students from Sandžak relieved their Serbian Orthodox counterparts of their blockade duties, saying, “Go home, celebrate Easter with your family. We’ll take care of this for you.” There were also iconic pictures of a Serbian student in traditional dress alongside a female Muslim student wearing a headscarf.
What is interesting is not just this solidarity across ethnic lines but also the very strong ethnoreligious symbolism they used. In a certain way, they were not saying, “Oh, we are all secular students, and we don’t care about religion and tradition, and we find ourselves there.” Rather, they were saying, “We particularly affirm these differences as significant but not as obstacles to cooperation.” That is a very interesting approach. They are not, in a certain way, post-national or denying these identities but are instead reclaiming those symbols and claims.
That is the positive side. The negative, or more complicated, side is that Kosovo remains a very fraught issue in Serbian politics, one where it is extremely difficult to demonstrate the same openness toward Albanians. They are a much smaller minority and do not have a university in the same way that there is one in an overwhelmingly Bosniak environment. Moreover, Kosovo remains a territory that the vast majority of Serbian citizens consider part of Serbia. That kind of openness toward Albanians has not emerged and has not been easy to achieve.
This is partly strategic because such openness might be more divisive, but also because it is more difficult to achieve than openness toward other national minorities. There were also occasional references to Kosovo that were more ethnonationalist in character. So, in this sense, the student movement sent two different signals. One was a very explicit openness toward national minorities, representing a clear break with previous traditions. But when it came to Kosovo, its discourse was very similar to the prevailing discourse of the regime.
Some of this was strategic because it was difficult to discuss this topic in Serbia’s political environment. Talking about it could have hurt the movement. But some of it certainly also reflected the genuine convictions of many participants in the movement.
The student movement attracted support across ideological, regional, and ethnic divisions, including cooperation between Serbian and Bosniak students. Can this civic mobilization produce lasting changes in Serbia’s treatment of Bosniak, Albanian, and Hungarian minorities, or will entrenched ethnonational cleavages reassert themselves after the transition?
Professor Florian Bieber: There is an opening now, and this is very critical. As I mentioned, this highly visible cross-ethnic support was also prominently displayed to voters. During the election campaign, for example, women wearing headscarves were highly visible among the candidates on the Students’ List, making a clear statement that they were included in both the Students’ List and its understanding of Serbia. That certainly marks a shift, and it will not be easy to return to the previous level of exclusion.
There were also early actions by activists after the student movement had won, such as painting over hate speech in public spaces in major cities across Serbia, including graffiti glorifying war criminals such as Ratko Mladić. Several of these acts indicate a clear desire to break with the prevalence of hate speech throughout the country.
It was not just the Students’ List but also citizens who became active after previously being prevented from doing so by thugs supporting the regime. So, it is not just the student movement. There seems to be a broader group of activists who really want to change how these topics are presented and discussed in Serbia. The change of government also provides an opportunity to address these issues.
Over the past 10 or 15 years, these topics had become almost taboo. Talking about Kosovo in any way that differed from the government’s position meant being labeled a traitor and effectively ostracized. Discussing war crimes or other sensitive issues was nearly impossible. So, I would expect these debates to become possible now, also because of the pluralism within the student movement. This opens the door to a more reflective discussion. It does not mean that society will change immediately, but it creates an opportunity for more critical reflection on these issues. That is what the student movement has achieved.
Of course, there are still many blind spots, as I mentioned, particularly regarding Kosovo, where achieving a more sustainable shift in the debate will be much harder. But this opening of space is significant, as is the Students’ List’s commitment to reducing hate speech, not just in the public sphere but also in the media. While much of the hate speech was directed against the Students’ List or other opposition candidates, it also targeted minorities and neighboring nations. If that hate speech is reduced, along with the role of the media that have been promoting it, this will represent both an atmospheric and a structural change in Serbia itself, providing a fresh start in how others are perceived in the current Serbian environment.
In your 2026 article, “Nationalist Visions of Europe,” you explore how the far right appropriates European identity for exclusionary political purposes. Could Serbia’s democratic transition foster a more inclusive understanding of European belonging, or will nationalism continue to constrain the country’s political and geopolitical orientation?
Professor Florian Bieber: It’s an interesting question to consider. Europe was not an important topic in Serbia during these elections. Europe is associated with the European Union, which many in Serbia perceived as supportive of Aleksandar Vučić’s regime. This judgment is not entirely unfair. The European Union certainly did not support everything the regime did, nor did it support the regime all the time, but there were gestures of support for the previous government that have tainted perceptions of the European Union in Serbia itself.
The question is whether the change of government can reset those relations and also change the image of Europe. At the same time, most supporters of the Students’ List do want to see Serbia move closer to the European Union, and there is, overall, a strong sense that Serbia belongs to Europe. When the students sought to communicate their message, they organized an ultramarathon and a bike race to Strasbourg and Brussels.
So, in a certain way, Europe and the European Union are natural points of reference. The question is how, after this change, Serbia can fit its own identity into the larger European puzzle and European debates. The previous government very much fostered the notion that Serbia did not fit in: that Serbia wanted to maintain good ties with Russia, which conflicted with prevailing narratives in the European Union; that Serbia wanted good relations with China; and that it did not want to recognize Kosovo. All of this, in a certain way, placed Serbia at odds with the larger European narrative.
The question is whether, down the road, the new Students’ List can promote not just the formalistic aspects of European integration, such as reforms and the accession process, but also an identity narrative about where Serbia fits into Europe. Into what kind of Europe does it fit? That question may, of course, extend beyond the Students’ List and become more of a long-term issue. But it is critical to understanding how a country, in its own self-understanding, fits into the larger European framework and how Europe talks about itself. This is, of course, also a moving target because the way Europe—meaning its citizens, publics, and politicians—talks about what Europe is has shifted over the last 15 or 20 years.
You warned before the elections that dismantling SNS control over public administration would be exceptionally difficult. What are the greatest institutional obstacles facing the Students’ List, particularly regarding the judiciary, security services, public broadcasting, and entrenched patronage networks?
Professor Florian Bieber: All of these are extremely difficult and challenging. The judiciary is particularly hard to change. On the one hand, it has now become active after the change of government, which is a sign that change is possible. But as we also know from reforms in Hungary and Poland, the judiciary, for good reason, has a certain level of independence from the government. Therefore, when the government changes, even if it becomes more democratic, it is harder to re-democratize the judiciary or restore its independence.
It is easier to make a ministry work than to make the judiciary work because you can simply order officials in a ministry to do their jobs. You cannot do this with the judiciary in the same way. So, the judiciary is much harder to reform, and it is critical not just for investigating past abuses but also for ensuring that it remains vigilant and that nobody is above the law. That is the biggest question.
The other major challenge is, of course, the security structures. They have never been completely reformed, even after the fall of Slobodan Milošević. In a certain way, they have been complicit and have a long history of serving as tools of the authorities. There are extensive links to organized crime, as well as individuals with criminal records going back to the 1990s. So, these structures will be much harder to break open because they are far more deeply entrenched.
There are, of course, other immediate challenges. How can you make ministries work when they are staffed by people hired because of their loyalty to the previous ruling party? Some of these obstacles might be difficult but surmountable through the mere power of opportunism. Again, as we discussed earlier, if people believe that Vučić’s power pyramid is crumbling, many might shift their positions and refrain from obstruction because they want to save their own skins in the future.
Then, of course, difficult questions arise for any movement coming to power after such a period: Where do you accept cooperation from those who were previously opportunistic, and where do you draw the line, saying, “That’s nice that you’re now collaborating with us, but you are tainted by your actions. You’ve committed acts that were illegal”? That also requires legal responses. These will be difficult decisions to make.
Another major issue is that the ruling party controlled nearly all municipalities in the country, and these municipalities remain in the hands of the previous ruling party because local elections are not scheduled for some time. Therefore, there will be a very unusual period in which local authorities continue to operate under the old ruling party while power at the center is now held by the Students’ List. How will that play out, and where might it become a source of tension?
The last major issue to mention is, of course, media freedom. This is also difficult because much of the media loyal to Vučić was privately owned rather than public. The critical question is how to create media pluralism. Some aspects might be easier than expected because post-election reports have revealed that many of these private media outlets received funding from state-owned enterprises, such as the telecommunications company. These subsidies essentially made their survival possible. Cutting those subsidies, for example, might be a relatively simple way to bring about the collapse of this fake media system created by the Vučić government.
But even then, we still do not have pluralistic, alternative media. It will take considerable time to develop media that are not merely free of propaganda but genuinely critical and capable of monitoring the Students’ List as well, which will be necessary. That will probably take quite a while.
The Students’ List must now translate decentralized protest practices into representative government. Can horizontal decision-making and direct democratic participation coexist with effective executive leadership, or does governing inevitably risk reproducing the personalized authority the movement opposed?
Professor Florian Bieber: This is a major debate within the Students’ List right now, particularly about how these different structures can coexist. You will have an elected government, chosen by Parliament in a representative democracy, but which also owes some of its legitimacy to the student movement, an extra-parliamentary group that bases its legitimacy and authority on the plenums. So, you have these different sources of legitimacy: the government, Parliament, and the student movement. The relationship among them remains to be fully defined because a government must also be able to act, sometimes quickly, and cannot always consult with the student movement, which has a much slower and more inclusive decision-making process.
To some degree, the student movement does not seem to want to make its current model of inclusive decision-making a permanent way of operating. Rather, it sees this model as appropriate for the transitional period of restoring democracy in Serbia. In a certain way, the emergence of individuals in the government or Parliament who are more successful or better able to communicate is not in itself a problem.
The expectation is that political parties will emerge from the Students’ List or work with existing political parties, and that in two or three years, depending on the timeframe, there will be elections that are competitive in the classical sense, with different political parties competing against one another. In a certain way, you also need new political actors who can gain the trust of citizens because a faceless Students’ List cannot remain a permanent feature of politics.
That is one aspect. The other question, of course, is how to translate some of these experiences of direct democracy and oversight, which the Students’ List wants to exercise, into permanent features of the political system. The question is whether there is space in Serbia to incorporate these participatory experiences rather than simply treating them as a one-off, temporary experiment during this transitional period. It is also a question of whether citizen engagement of this kind might benefit democracy in Serbia and possibly beyond.
Serbia’s democratic transition invites comparison with the overthrow of Milošević in October 2000. Why did the post-2000 democratic experiment fail to prevent the subsequent resurgence of competitive authoritarianism, and what institutional safeguards would be necessary to avoid repeating that trajectory?
Professor Florian Bieber: That is a critical question on everybody’s mind: how to avoid the mistakes of the past. In Serbia, it is often said that there was no October 6, meaning the day after the overthrow of Milošević, which would have marked a clear rupture with the previous regime. Instead, it was a highly managed transition. Many of the power holders from the previous regime managed to survive through these negotiations. The absence of a clear rupture and a full investigation of those responsible, whether business interests, security structures, or political actors, made it very easy for them to retain their influence. That also made it possible to roll back the changes. So, this kind of rupture with the previous institutional structures is critical.
I think there is considerable awareness of this now. The Students’ List does not owe anything to anybody. First of all, it won an outright majority and did not have to make compromises to win the elections. It also does not carry the baggage of old political parties that might have favors to repay or deals to honor. That makes things easier, and there are greater opportunities to make this break now. On the other hand, this was an election that brought about a change of government, which makes the idea of a rupture less pronounced than it was in 2000. Back then, there was an election, but in the end, it was civic mobilization and the storming of Parliament that brought about the change. We did not have that this time. The protests took place before the elections, not afterward. So, in that sense, it is easier to say, “Well, this is just an election, and the loser accepted the results.” That makes it harder to prepare mentally for this kind of rupture.
Another reason the transformation after 2000 did not fully succeed was that a large number of citizens were deeply frustrated with the changes that followed. This was already clear in the first elections after 2000, when the Radical Party, the ultranationalist party, became the largest single party. It was from that party that Aleksandar Vučić and his Progressive Party eventually emerged. These frustrated citizens were the classic losers of the transition. They blamed the new authorities for their job losses, poverty, and other difficulties. It was these people who enabled the return of those autocratic structures.
So, what also needs to be kept in mind is not just the rupture with the current system but also the need to ensure that those who have now voted for the Progressive Party are not forgotten and are brought on board. Otherwise, they could become voters for a party that might try to roll back some of the changes that will take place in the coming months and years.
Your research highlights Vučić’s strategic balancing between the European Union, Russia, and China. Could the student-led transition fundamentally reorient Serbia toward European integration, or will unresolved questions surrounding Kosovo, Russia, and domestic nationalism limit the prospects for geopolitical realignment?
Professor Florian Bieber: The Students’ List has stayed away from foreign policy and made it very clear that this is not its priority. It will undoubtedly be confronted with foreign policy challenges. Relations with Russia will be critical. There is the question of the sale of Serbia’s large energy company, presumably from Russian to Hungarian ownership, due to sanctions. There are also questions surrounding sanctions on Russia, but overall, the student movement is trying to avoid addressing these issues. Certainly, it will not try to resolve relations with Kosovo or find a long-term solution because these issues are too divisive internally, and it does not have a mandate to address them. It has a mandate for domestic reforms, not major foreign policy shifts.
So, what we should expect is that the student movement will naturally look more toward the EU, as we discussed earlier. It is seeking to democratize the country, and in that effort, it will find more allies in the EU than in Russia or China. But it is unlikely to pursue a profound geopolitical reorientation. This challenge will fall more to a future government, depending on the political constellation that emerges once elections are held on the basis of traditional political options. At that point, there might be a clearer mandate to pursue a more concerted geopolitical reorientation of Serbia.
I would therefore expect a more gradual, subtle recalibration simply as a result of having a democratic government, which will naturally look elsewhere. But I would not expect a high-profile, symbolic shift.
Vučić’s support for nationalist actors in Republika Srpska and elsewhere reinforced authoritarian and ethnonational networks across the Western Balkans. How might his electoral defeat affect Milorad Dodik’s political project, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s constitutional stability, and prospects for regional reconciliation?
Professor Florian Bieber: Certainly, with the defeat of Vučić’s Progressive Party, the networks the party has been promoting—including its ties to Dodik, Serbian parties in Montenegro, and the Serbian List in Kosovo—will be disrupted. It will also represent a kind of defeat for the ultranationalist message. The Students’ List has signaled that it will respect the sovereignty of neighboring countries and has already adopted a different vocabulary for talking about Serbia’s neighbors than the Vučić government used.
At the same time, however, these parties have their own power bases. Dodik was successful before Vučić. He has been in charge of Republika Srpska in Bosnia, de facto, for 20 years. So assuming that these political structures will crumble because of Vučić’s defeat would be an overestimation of its impact.
Nevertheless, his defeat will certainly have a weakening effect on these structures and perhaps even a demonstration effect. The grievances that many Serbs in Republika Srpska have toward Milorad Dodik are not that different from those they have toward Aleksandar Vučić. So, we might also see the emergence of social movements, or at least a more visible articulation of frustration with the authoritarian aspects of these political actors.
But again, I would not expect a radical break, but rather a more gradual shift.
And finally, Professor Bieber, considering democratic breakthroughs and authoritarian setbacks in Serbia, Hungary, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and other competitive authoritarian contexts, what generalizable lessons emerge from Serbia’s experience? Can student-led civic resistance provide a sustainable pathway from populist authoritarianism to democratic consolidation, or does its success depend on exceptional national circumstances?
Professor Florian Bieber: There is no single path out of competitive authoritarian regimes. If we look at different experiences, including Hungary, we see that there are various paths. But one thing that emerges is that successful movements, parties, and coalitions tend to be ideologically broad. This was the case in Hungary. The coalition that overthrew Orbán was not the traditional political opposition but rather a party that retained many elements of Orbán’s ideas while also reaching out to the center and the left.
In Montenegro, it was a broad coalition. In Serbia, it is also a broad coalition. So you cannot replace incumbents simply with an ideological alternative. Rather, you need a broad ideological spectrum to attract people.
You also need to mobilize people. Elections alone are not enough; you need broad civic mobilization. This can take many different forms. It does not necessarily have to be a social movement like the one in Serbia, but you need a broad movement that reaches out to citizens. In all these cases, voter turnout was higher. Therefore, mobilizing people who have become passive and disillusioned with politics is critical.
It is this combination of factors that matters. Serbia represents one way of achieving this, and certainly an innovative one, because of its plenums, democratic structure, and lack of visible political leadership. But there are broader lessons to be learned, lessons that seem to recur across all these cases.
(*) This interview was academically curated and edited by Dr. Bulent Kenes.
