Serbia election results expected to be ‘very tight’, analyst says

And we can move on now to Serbia, where grassroots student-led movements could actually shake up Serbia's political landscape. After two years of protest, the students are running under the student list in this weekend's SNAP parliamentary elections with the aim of putting an end to 14 years of Aleksandar Vucic. For analysis, I'm joined here on set now by Berta Lopes-Dominic from the European Policy Centre. Good morning. So tell us what's at stake in these elections that are being very closely watched by Brussels. Good morning. Thank you for having me. And these elections have been framed as a referendum for the future of Serbia and for the future of the existing regime of the Serbian Progressive Party, which has been in power since 2012. On the one hand, we have the SNS, which is running with Vucic, who was the president recently, and he resigned in order to be able to run for the parliamentary election. And on the other hand, we have the student list, which is the result of this movement that has been created in these two years of protests. They've managed to gather huge support across the country with a very simple program, which is basically restoring democratic institutions. And then on the other hand, tackling specific material demands such as housing, health, labor, etc. And we saw the pictures last night from Belgrade. I mean, astonishing how many people they've managed to bring together. But the question, of course, we're all asking, could they actually topple and oust a leader who's been in power for over 14 years? Indeed, like in these past two years, we've seen the biggest, the largest protest in Serbia since like in this century. Of course, whether they will manage to topple Vucic or not, we will not know until next week when we have the results. But what is true is that it's the first time in 14 years that an alternative to Vucic has real options. For now, all opinion polls predict very tight results. There are some that give a slight margin of victory for the students. There are some that give a slight margin of victory for SNS. But all of them are very tight and participation is expected to be very high. And what ticket are they running on the students? What issues are they putting out there? So as I was mentioning, basically they have issued an 11 points program, which is based on restoring democratic institutions. So they talk about public procurement and also the judiciary, independence of the police. And then on the other hand, they also address issues that are important for the entire, like the entirety of the, that can appeal to the general population, such as housing, access to health, access to education, better labor conditions and so on. And meanwhile, Berta, just one final question. Serbia's path towards the European Union is slightly on hold for now. Yeah, Serbia's EU path has been on hold since 2021. Since then, there has been no progress in Serbia's EU path. And this has been mainly due to the lack of progress in the fundamentals in Cluster 1, which is related to democratic institutions, rule of law, public procurement, public administration. despite and in fact Serbia despite meeting some of the technical conditions for making progress since there's no progress and there has even been backsliding in these fundamental issues Serbia's EU path has been kept on hold and the students despite they have not declared themselves explicitly as pro-EU and in fact they put the the Serbia's EU future as something to be decided in the future their demands and what they are advocating for they align with what the EU has been demanding of Serbia. Okay, EU enlargement. A fascinating topic that we'll dive into at our EU enlargement summit taking place on the 3rd of November. Bertha, thank you so much for joining us.