Perhaps we will find out what prevented Aleksandar Vučić from carrying out yet another coup d’état. Or perhaps we won’t. What we could see with our own eyes, at least in Belgrade, was the re-establishment and reoccupation of a paramilitary camp, the renewed construction of a metal and human wall supposedly surrounding the buildings of the Republic Electoral Commission (REC), but in reality the Presidential Residence (where, presumably, he no longer lives?), and the deployment of armoured vehicles and heavily armed police. His television stations had just switched the election results around, awarding an absolute majority to the losers, when the biggest loser nevertheless appeared before the cameras and admitted defeat.
Seven days later, all participants in the elections are left with plenty of “what if” questions and regrets. All except the Student List.
The former regime, embodied by Serbia’s former president, could have chosen not to call elections that it would go on to lose so spectacularly. It could have responded differently to the collapse of the canopy, as any normal state would have done. It could also have carried out its planned coup, as it had done so many times before. But let them torment themselves over what they failed to do. We will take pleasure in watching the psychological and mathematical experiment known in game theory as “The Prisoner’s Dilemma” unfold.
It works like this: in the absence of evidence, two accomplices are offered the same deal. If you confess and your partner doesn’t, you go free while he gets ten years in prison. If he confesses and you don’t, you get ten years and he goes free. If both of you confess, you each get five years. And usually, both confess (even though mutual silence would set them both free), because they do not trust one another, and because serving five years is a better deal than serving ten.
The other three contenders, the supposed Factor of Stability, the supposedly Authentic Right Wing, and the supposedly European List, also have their “what if” regrets. The regime’s long-standing coalition partner (with one exception of the four-year period of refusing to support the government), the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), probably has the least regrets. It could not have acted differently because there was no alternative. Had there been one, it would certainly have taken advantage of it, given how lucrative a relationship with those in power has always been for the party.
The self-proclaimed Authentic Right Wing, just like the self-proclaimed pro-European camp, could have acted differently. Yet both confidently insisted that they would only lend their support to the Student List once they entered parliament. If it is any consolation to them, and it probably isn’t, there is only one “what if” that they need not agonise over: no, it could not have been you. You could not have been the ones to bring down the regime.
Only a student movement organised in this particular way could have brought about a situation in which Aleksandar Vučić behaves like an ex-boyfriend who keeps calling you (through his Informer newspaper and television network), wailing down the phone and threatening you with a breakup that has already happened, but which he refuses to acknowledge. Only people like these students had the ability and the means to peacefully remove such a violent, criminal, unnatural and debauched government.
And, in doing so, they drew an emotional geography: Novi Sad, Novi Pazar, Nova Srbija (New Serbia).
Translated by Marijana Simić
Peščanik.net, 04.11.2026.
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