Brussels spent 14 years treating Vučić as a safe pair of hands. Serbia's voters may now do what the EU never would.

Aleksandar Vučić has won every election he has contested since 2012. To keep the streak going, he has now done something unusual even by Balkan standards. On 27 September, Serbia's president resigned his office so that he could lead his party's list in Sunday's parliamentary election and try to come back as prime minister.

His opponents are not a party in the usual sense. The Student List grew out of the protests that followed the collapse of the newly renovated railway station canopy in Novi Sad in November 2024, which killed 16 people. Two years of demonstrations later, an independent pollster, New Serbian Political Thought, has the students on 44.5% and Vučić's list on 42.7%. According to Politico Europe, it is the first time in more than a decade that an opposition list has led a national poll before an election.

It is one poll, and its own editor calls it a snapshot, not a projection. But for the first time in a long time, Serbia's election is not a formality. That should embarrass Brussels more than it does.

The man in the black Škoda

Vučić is campaigning as only he can. Politico reports that he has driven himself to rallies in a black Škoda while singing folk songs on TikTok. In one advert, he plays a waiter taking a Serbian family's order: the grandfather asks for no sanctions on Russia, the others for motorways, pay rises and better pensions. In another, he debates an empty chair holding a photo of the Student List's lead candidate, the cardiologist Ilija Srdanović, and a cabbage-pickling stone.

It is funny until you read the small print. The OSCE's election observers, in their interim report, note complaints about a late-August decision to pay out "almost EUR 1 billion in one-off payments to adult citizens" about two months before the vote. They record reports of intimidation of activists, broadcasters "perceived as favouring the government and the ruling party", and "unusually high numbers of voters registered in certain municipalities and at particular addresses", which the authorities "have not publicly explained". Pro-government media, Politico adds, have taken to calling independent pollsters "fake researchers".

And last month, as The Guardian recalls, Ratko Mladić, convicted of genocide over Srebrenica, was buried in Belgrade with military honours.

Stability, at any price

None of this happened in secret. For fourteen years, Vučić has been, in Politico's phrase, "the West's awkward but indispensable partner in the Balkans". Serbia is an EU candidate that has refused to sanction Russia. Its leader went to Moscow for Vladimir Putin's Victory Day parade last year. And, as Politico puts it, "European leaders have mostly looked the other way, valuing a predictable Belgrade over a democratic one."

They did more than look away. In July 2024, with Serbian activists already protesting against a lithium mine in the Jadar valley, the Commission flew to Belgrade to sign a strategic partnership with Vučić's government on raw materials and batteries. Brussels needed lithium. Vučić needed photographs with Brussels. Both got what they wanted.

The accession process, meanwhile, has quietly died. Serbia has not opened a single new negotiating cluster since December 2021, DW notes. On 28 October, the Commission will present roadmaps for the next steps for Ukraine, Montenegro, Moldova and Albania. Serbia is not on the list. Florian Bieber, a Balkans scholar at the University of Graz, told DW's Serbian service that Vučić's government "was never truly interested in European integration" and that the EU "should have seen through that bluff earlier".

That is the honest summary. Brussels let a candidate it did not believe in keep the label, the funds and the photo opportunities, because a strongman who answered the phone was easier than a democracy that might not.

The students are not Brussels' children

Here is the part the Commission will not enjoy. If the students win, it will not be because of anything the EU did. Their programme, according to DW, does not even mention EU membership, and earlier this month they said they did not favour sanctions on Russia. They have campaigned on corruption, the rule of law and the dead of Novi Sad, not on flags with yellow stars. The only list that puts EU membership at the centre of its campaign, European Serbia, may not clear the 3% threshold, according to the Guardian.

That is not a sign that Serbians have turned against Europe. It is a sign that they have stopped expecting Brussels to help them. Through two years of protests, the largest in the country's modern history, European leaders were, in Politico's words, "conspicuously slow to say anything". Enlargement commissioner Marta Kos has said only that, after the vote, it will become clear how ready the new government really is to reform.

There is something reassuring in all this. Democracy in Serbia, if it comes back, will come back the way it should: through Serbian voters, Serbian volunteers knocking on Serbian doors, and a ballot that the regime could not quite make meaningless. Not through conditionality, roadmaps or a commissioner's press release.

What Brussels should do on Monday

The vote could still go either way, and the observers' concerns about the voter register, a first audit report on which is due only on 28 October, mean the result may be contested whoever wins. If Vučić's list wins narrowly and the count is disputed, Brussels will face the question it has dodged for a decade: whether a predictable partner is worth a stolen election.

If the students win, the temptation will be the opposite: to rush in, claim the victory and start telling the new government what its priorities should be. It should resist that too. The EU spent fourteen years backing the wrong horse in Belgrade. The least it can do now is let Serbians ride their own.