“Vucic’s defeat is bad news for the European right”, business daily Handelsblatt said on Tuesday. “After Orban in Hungary, a youth movement has now also driven the Serbian autocrat from office”.
Sueddeutsche Zeitung called the vote neither free nor fair, saying Vucic’s swift concession despite these facts showed how crushing the result was for him. It described the outcome as another “spark of hope” in a Europe where the far right and nationalists are gaining ground.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said the student list’s win bordered on a sensation. Power changed hands, it said, because Vucic, unlike Erdogan or Putin, could not afford to jail opponents for long terms or order their elimination.
“Serbia is too small to ignore the judgment of the outside world. Vucic was an autocrat, but not a classic dictator”, it said.
Challenges for the winners
Commentators were united in doubting that the victors can deliver quickly.
Handelsblatt’s Carsten Volkery said the student list promised a fresh start, “but that is easier said than done”. Like Hungary, he argued, it must begin by dismantling the system Vucic built so that institutions become independent and the rule of law is restored.
He noted that the list wants a government of experts but lacks a decisive leader with personal authority, which could prove a problem if factions fall out.
Die Welt’s Carolina Drueten said most candidates have no administrative experience. “Organising a protest movement is something different from governing a country”, she wrote. She added that the student movement is highly diverse and includes nationalists alongside liberal, pro-European forces.
Sueddeutsche said the government faces a huge task in fighting corruption and mafia groups, and that Serbia now heads into a presidential election.
EU and Russia questions
Brussels hopes the new authorities will take a pro-European course and push through reforms, the papers said. Die Welt said enlargement has returned to the agenda since Russia’s attack on Ukraine, and that Brussels fears countries denied a credible membership prospect could drift towards Russia or China.
A democratic new start in Serbia, the region’s largest and most populous country, would carry major geopolitical weight, the paper said.
But there are no guarantees. “The country did not change overnight”, Handelsblatt said, adding that Hungary showed a change of government can alter the tone while leaving some policies untouched.
Sueddeutsche pointed to the winners’ 50-page-plus programme, about which “not everything will please Serbia’s European partners”. It keeps up the fiction that Kosovo still belongs to Serbia and rejects joining sanctions on Moscow. “But a programme is one thing, political reality another”, it said.
“It is not a foregone conclusion that Serbia will automatically move closer to the EU and further from Russia”, Die Welt wrote.
FAZ called Serbia a “democratic experiment” whose course, including in foreign policy, is hard to predict.
“If the EU rolls out a red carpet for Serbia, it may turn out that most Serbs will not want to step onto it”, it said.
(jh)
Source: PAP