The EU spent over a decade treating the Serbian strongman as indispensable. Now it needs to handle a skeptical incoming government.
BELGRADE — Brussels has lost its man in Belgrade.
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.
“Aleksandar Vučić acted like the go-to person for everything while ignoring all the laws in the country, including the constitution,” Jugoslav Gašić, an assistant professor in medicine at several universities and soon-to-be MP, said in an interview.
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.
“Ultimately, [Vučić] always represented his own interests and not the interests of Serbia,” said Gašić.
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.
“The key lesson that should be drawn from the case of Serbia is that the EU can very easily lose credibility and integrity if it ignores the causes of democratic backsliding in a country,” said Srdjan Majstorović, chairman of the governing board of the European Policy Center (CEP), a think tank.
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. “Yet I think we need to reset our priorities with the EU, where we consider Serbia’s interests first. 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.
The European Commission didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article.
“The Commission must first restore its long-lost credibility after years of propping up Vučić,” said Djordje Bojović, a foreign policy advisor for Greens in the European Parliament.
He said that Serbia has long been demonized and struggled to reinvent its image since the 1990s, an image “only further cemented by Vučić’s repressive authoritarianism.”
Despite those concerns, Serbia’s economic ties with Europe flourished during Vučić’s time in power, with the country becoming one of the region’s leading destinations for foreign investment.
Under Vučić, Serbia went from about €750 million in foreign direct investment in 2012 to more than €30 billion over the following decade, more than the rest of the Western Balkans combined.
In Brussels, figures such as Bojović and representatives of the opposition parties would plead with institutions such as the Parliament and the Commission to meet with them or take their concerns seriously.
“Vučić had convinced all of them that the opposition is not worth talking to and that they’re not credible,” Bojović said.
Now, with SNS firmly relegated to the opposition, Brussels will need to rethink how it works with Serbia. To many Serbians, the EU has 12 years of looking the other way to answer for first.