Serbia's leaderless student movement is a novel democratic experiment other European countries should study
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/aleksandar-matkovic. "A leaderless revolution has swept Serbia. The world should be watching | Aleksandar Matković | The Guardian." October 27, 2026. www.theguardian.com
The Gist
A student-led movement with no single leader has just won Serbia's election after two years of organised debate and protest against a corrupt government. The author argues this is a new way of doing politics that other countries facing similar crises should study. He admits it's unclear whether such a movement can actually govern.
Conclusion
The world, and especially other European countries facing unrest, should closely watch and study Serbia's leaderless Student List movement, because it may represent the start of a very different kind of politics based on self-organisation and collective decision-making.
Premises
- The Student List emerged from a novel political culture: nearly two years of university blockades and plenary assemblies in which students collectively debated the economy, resource exploitation and public services, so that knowledge came first and organisation followed.
- The movement united people of differing political convictions against the perceived corruption of Vučić's government and its close ties to foreign corporations, while the traditional opposition parties were seen as ineffective and easily corrupted.
- The Student List won the parliamentary election, beating the rightwing government and nearly all opposition parties, many of which failed to reach the electoral threshold, which shows the old party-based politics has been decisively rejected in Serbia.
- The movement is organised without traditional leadership and fielded a list of highly educated, gender-balanced, mostly first-time candidates, which goes beyond conventional party politics.
- Other European countries are experiencing student and popular protests driven by interlocking crises of housing, education and the environment, which governments have mismanaged, so Serbia's model of collective intelligence may be relevant to them.
- Whether the movement can govern remains uncertain, because it is ideologically divided, inexperienced, and faces a Vučić who may keep his party apparatus intact for a comeback, but this uncertainty makes the experiment more worth studying.
Assumptions
- An electoral victory by a leaderless movement is evidence that the model works and is not a product of Serbia-specific circumstances.
- Conditions in other European countries are similar enough to Serbia's for the lessons to transfer.
- Collective, decentralised deliberation can scale from protest movements to actual governance.
- The rejection of the existing parties in Serbia reflects a rejection of party-based politics as such, rather than of these particular parties.
- The author's firsthand involvement gives him reliable insight rather than biasing his assessment.