Student List

The campaign runs under the slogan Serbia or Mafia because the highlight is corruption, para-police gangs, and links between the state and organized crime.

Student list volunteers report visiting 170,000 households in 20 days on their door-knocking runs.

They set up stands in markets and neighborhoods and villages.

They have an initiative called A Student in Every Village, which brought door-to-door visits to voters who just don't attend rallies.

Most opposition parties also stood aside to give the student list a clear run.

And Vucic pulled out all the hooligan tricks.

He labeled students foreign-backed blockaders.

So there are these little kids who are wearing raincoats covered in paint, having a blast, wiping the slate of their beautiful ancient city clean.

The revoking of Alta Bank's operating license is just one sign that the Balkan state has entered a new political era.

Longtime leader Alexander Vucic lost a parliamentary election to a group known as Student List just over a week ago.

The leaderless movement, made up of doctors, writers, and other professionals, had protested against Vucic's alleged corruption.

Here to help us understand what's next for Serbia is Martin Dunaj, who's been reporting on Alta Bank.

And it has eyed regional expansion in neighboring countries and even wanted to take over Adico Bank, which is a Vienna-based bank in the Eurozone.

And that's when the European Central Bank also began to investigate Alta Bank for suspected money laundering.

Now, the student list didn't initiate the case, but it works perfectly for them to illustrate just what was wrong with the Vucic regime.

So why is the bank being shut down now, though?

Yes.

It now looks like the leaderless anti-corruption coalition known as the Student List has defeated former President Aleksandar Vucic's Serbian Progressive Party by a really comfortable margin.

They've got an absolute majority of 141 seats, well clear of the 125 that they need.

Yes, it's a stunning result.

They make the call to call the election when they think they can win and he thought he could win and he didn't.

He certainly didn't.

So now we have the student list with this absolute majority.

Now, as you alluded to earlier...

But it turns out they can be beaten.

In Serbia's parliamentary election last weekend, the conservative coalition led by the Serbian Progressive Party of former President Aleksandar Vucic, who was seeking to reposition himself as prime minister, was routed by a new force, Student List, which grew from the enormous protests aroused two years ago by the collapse of an ill-maintained railway station in Novi Sad.

This comes six months after the similarly seismic election in Serbia's neighbour, Hungary, assumed to be a state thoroughly captured by Putinist Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party, who were nevertheless turfed unceremoniously out.

And though Brazil's recent presidential election was won, eventually, by its incumbent, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's unlikely triumph can also be counted as a similar sort of victory, given that the alternative was a return to the paranoid culture wars of a rabble-rouser named Bolsonaro.

Well, joining us now from Belgrade is Dragana Obradovic, a Serbian director of BIRN, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.

Dragana, let's start with a very basic question, especially those who may be coming anew to new developments in Serbian politics.

How would you go about explaining who and what the student list is?

Not easy.

He lost.

It was a party called the Student List that won and very convincingly.

And it was...

Now, does this mean, you know, from a, I think, again, it should be actually very important to note that this was about, this really was about domestic issues.

And over that time, you know, you start to get too comfortable and a lot of the people around him got... very comfortable with making money from their positions or abusing their positions in different ways.

I think something similar happened in Serbia.

Because, well, in general, the student list didn't even talk about foreign policy.

It was entirely a focus on domestic issues.

Two voice essays, one from myself and one from Philip Pilkington.

Longtime Serbian leader Aleksandar Vucic lost an election this week against Student List, an interesting group that doesn't necessarily have a coherent ideology.

So was this a great victory for the European Union and the rules-based international order? Or is the truth something a little bit more complicated? Philip Pilkington will be answering this question, and it's a more important one than it might seem.

Meantime, my question's a little bit simpler.

The more reliable polls like Ipsos were putting him ahead.

Until the day of the election, the polling markets were putting him ahead significantly.

The student list, which was the opposition, wasn't really a political party, had no leadership.

It's not even clear who the MPs are going to be.