What Serbia’s Student Victory Means for China 

Serbia’s snap parliamentary elections on October 25 ended 14 years of Serbian Progressive Party rule. With turnout of approximately 69 percent, the highest in decades, the Student List (SL) won an outright majority. Preliminary results from the Republic Electoral Commission gave it 52.71 percent of the vote and 140 of 250 parliamentary seats, against 39.17 percent and 104 seats for the list led by Aleksandar Vučić. The result is a dramatic domestic political reversal, but not necessarily a shift in Serbia’s international orientation.

Published in September, shortly before the elections, the SL program offers a starting point for assessing what its victory could mean for Serbia’s place in the world and its strategic partnership with China. Read alongside the movement’s origins and the students’ 11-point plan, it suggests that the rules governing Chinese engagement in Serbia are set to change, while the architecture of the partnership – its political logic and economic framework – is likely to remain intact.

From the Canopy to the Ballot Box

The SL grew out of protests that followed the collapse of a concrete canopy at Novi Sad railway station in November 2024, which killed 16 people. The station had reopened in July 2024 after extensive renovation involving Chinese companies. Questions about the works, missing documentation, and delayed accountability turned the tragedy into a student-led protest against corruption and institutional failure.

In the ensuing months, the students organized mass street demonstrations and blocked universities, building a nationwide movement around broader demands for the rule of law and functioning public institutions, before calling for early elections in May 2025. The movement’s organizational model rested on plenums: assemblies at individual faculties where enrolled students could propose, debate, and make decisions that were later coordinated among different faculties and universities. The model ensured that no individual leaders emerged. 

These plenums also nominated, scrutinized, and selected the 250 candidates who ran against Vučić’s list. The resulting SL was deliberately kept away from conventional politics. Neither students nor former or current members of the governing coalition, or officials of any of the current parliamentary opposition parties, could stand as candidates. They were instead drawn from society at large and each signed a statement accepting moral and political responsibility for advancing the students’ demands. 

Throughout the process, these demands remained overwhelmingly domestic. Despite the Chinese companies’ involvement in the railway station renovation, the movement did not frame the Novi Sad tragedy as an issue of Chinese influence or turn it into an anti-China campaign. Criticism instead targeted Serbian institutions. Foreign policy, including Serbia’s relations with China, was left outside the movement’s political agenda.

Foreign Policy Begins at Home

The silence on foreign affairs should not be mistaken for the absence of a vision. The program’s order makes the case. It starts with the state itself: professionalizing the diplomatic service by ending party patronage and politically motivated appointments, reviewing discretionary citizenship grants and passports issued amid suspected corruption, and strengthening ties with the diaspora. 

Next come the nation and its interests. The program first pledges to preserve “Kosovo and Metohija” within Serbia under the Serbian Constitution and UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1244, oppose its membership in international organizations, review existing agreements with Pristina for constitutional compliance, prosecute regime officials responsible for unconstitutional ones, and protect Serbian institutions and the rights of Serbs on “both sides of the Ibar River” – a Serbian political shorthand for all Kosovo Serbs, both those in the Serb-majority north and those in the scattered enclaves of the Albanian-majority south. 

It then commits to advancing the interests of Serbian people in neighboring countries. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the program vows to defend Republika Srpska’s constitutional competences and veto rights, to review, with the international community, the High Representative’s use of Bonn Powers, to insist on his appointment with UNSC consent, and to respond diplomatically and legally to any overreach that infringes the entity’s rights. In Montenegro, it promises to advocate for a better status for the Serbian people and for the exercise of rights guaranteed by constitutional protections of identity and against assimilation. In Croatia, it will insist on the rights of Serbs and the preservation of their national, cultural, and linguistic identity, with particular attention to returnees and compliance with relevant UNSC documents and other related agreements.

Many of these national interests run through the UNSC or treaty law, which Serbia cannot influence alone. The program names Russia as its partner there; on China it is silent, although Beijing’s long-standing support on Kosovo, including its non-recognition, does the same work. On the High Representative, China goes further, aligning with Republika Srpska (and Russia) by refusing to recognize his mandate.

Europe and the world come last. The program calls the EU Serbia’s most important economic partner and backs deeper cooperation. Yet it never names EU membership a priority or a strategic goal, even as it aims to reach IBAR status – a milestone in the rule-of-law chapters of the accession process. By contrast, the SL explicitly commits Serbia to its traditional partnership with Russia, continued coordination at the UNSC, and no sanctions on Moscow. With the US, it would continue the strategic dialogue on telecommunications, energy, transport, AI, and defense, and increase trade and high-technology investment. 

Firmer Rules for the Partnership with China

On China, the program supports further developing the comprehensive strategic partnership, names China Serbia’s most important trading partner in Asia, and envisages moving beyond “existing economic, infrastructure and industrial projects toward high-technology investment.” But it also insists that all future projects “comply with domestic regulations, environmental standards, workers’ rights and occupational safety.” This is the only condition in the foreign-policy section tied to a specific partner. 

The condition does not stand alone. The 11-point plan pairs it with a second track that looks backward. Its third point promises to open all state contracts and tenders, strengthen the State Audit Institution, and audit all non-transparent and overpriced infrastructure projects executed to date, focusing on classified agreements, special laws, and missed deadlines. The measure is not China-specific, but given the scale of Chinese engagement in Serbia, Chinese companies could be affected, including the consortium behind the Novi Sad railway station renovation. The two tracks complement each other: forward conditions for future projects, and backward audits of those already carried out. Between them, much of the Chinese portfolio is open to scrutiny. Still, a call for compliance and transparency does not amount to a new relationship. It changes how contracts are made and judged, not whether Serbia makes them.

Beyond Vučić

The new government inherits a relationship with China that expanded on every front under Vučić. Politically, it was raised to a comprehensive strategic partnership in 2016 and, in 2024, to a commitment to build a “community with a shared future in the new era,” wrapped in the rhetoric of “iron-clad friendship.” Economically, the bilateral Free Trade Agreement entered into force in 2024. Chinese companies secured major contracts for the Expo 2027 complex and related infrastructure, in part under a special law that set aside ordinary procedures – a category the 11-point plan singles out for special scrutiny. Between mid-2024 and mid-2025, more than 30 projects were implemented, and Vučić’s May 2026 visit to China produced more than 30 new agreements and memorandums, along with approximately €1 billion in announced Chinese investment. 

The scale was new, but the architecture was not. Its political logic and economic framework predate Vučić and have survived very different governments. It was an earlier president, Boris Tadić, who signed the first strategic partnership in 2009 and made China one of the four pillars of Serbian foreign policy. The same year, his government concluded an intergovernmental agreement that, as some analysts argue, Vučić’s government later used heavily to award work to Chinese firms directly, outside standard procurement rules. Tadić in turn built on ties from the Milošević era, when decades of economic cooperation were joined by China’s condemnation of the 1999 NATO bombing and its support for Serbia’s position on Kosovo. The inheritance is therefore two-layered: a political logic rooted in Kosovo, and an economic framework for Chinese engagement. The SL’s agenda reaches the contracts and projects within that framework, not the framework itself, and leaves the logic untouched.

Continuity Under New Rules 

On October 26, Beijing said it respected the choice of the Serbian people and was ready to work with the new administration on the basis of equality and mutual respect. It has also shown elsewhere in Europe that it can quickly adjust to a change of government.

The SL’s program supports the strategic partnership and sets a condition specific to China for future projects, while the 11-point plan proposes opening all state contracts and public tenders, and auditing non-transparent and overpriced infrastructure built to date, which could reach some work done by Chinese companies. At home, the rules are set to change. Abroad, the political logic holds: Serbia still needs China’s support. That is the tension worth watching. Much will depend on whether the new government turns its plan and program into practice. The likely outcome is not a break with Beijing but a relationship in which strategic cooperation continues while the rules governing Chinese economic engagement change.