Serbia: a majority without a name, and a calendar

Serbia’s Republic Electoral Commission has put numbers on Sunday’s upset. On preliminary results from 8,187 polling stations, the Student List won 2,267,615 votes, 52.71%, and 140 seats; Aleksandar Vučić’s United Serbia list won 39.17% and 104 seats¹. About 4.3 million people voted¹. Turnout was 68.78%, the highest in more than 30 years, according to the commission’s Sunday figures². A majority needs 126 of the 250 seats².

Desk arithmetic: 140 seats is 14 more than a majority, so the winners need no coalition partner.

What the movement does not yet have is a name at the top. It ran deliberately without a hierarchy and named no candidate for prime minister^2,3. Ilija Srdanović, the Novi Sad cardiologist who headed the list, is widely seen as the likeliest choice, but the ministries of interior, finance and justice are open². One Belgrade analyst told the Guardian the movement’s decision-making also needed to “be sped up”, since choosing candidates “took a long time – months”³.

The constitution will help with that. The new National Assembly must meet within 30 days of the final result; a government must be formed within 90 days after that^2,3. Separately, because Vučić resigned as president on 27 September, Ana Brnabić, the assembly’s president and acting head of state, must call a presidential election by 27 December².

The programme is institutional rather than rhetorical: an independent police unit answerable to prosecutors, a ban on appointing party loyalists to state companies, and independent scrutiny of large infrastructure contracts³. Those are dull promises, which is their virtue. They will be tested in public institutions staffed, as the Guardian puts it, with civil servants loyal to the outgoing regime³. A movement born of a collapsed railway canopy in Novi Sad now has to show that procedure, not personality, can carry a country.