A High-School Teacher Will Reportedly Run Serbia's Parliament - and Vučić Is Waiting for Her From the Opposition Benches

A little over two weeks ago the "Student List" won Serbia's snap parliamentary election with 140 of 250 seats. On Tuesday, 17 November, the new Assembly meets for its constitutive session. And the first name coming out of the new majority is neither a general nor a party veteran: according to claims from the camp close to Aleksandar Vučić, the candidate for Speaker is Katarina Šćepanović, a teacher at the Philological High School in Belgrade.

Pro-Vučić circles greeted the news with a sneer: a high-school teacher, and facing her in the chamber will sit Vučić, Milenko Jovanov and Ana Brnabić. "Good luck with them," they said. The people who until yesterday wrote the rules in that chamber will now hear them from someone who has so far run classes, not sessions.

Wanted: a prime minister, and a police minister even more

According to the same claims, the new majority is still locking horns over who gets to form the government. Dejan Šoškić reportedly thought the job was his and went as far as Washington, but lost support in the second round of talks. The new favourite is Branko Milutinović, founder of Nordeus, the company American Take-Two bought in 2021 for up to 378 million dollars. Zdenko Tomanović is mentioned as a third, least likely option.

The fight over the Interior Ministry is even sharper. Sociologist Jovo Bakić reportedly tried very hard to become police minister, but Božo Prelević is now seen as having the better odds. A movement that took to the streets against parties carving up public posts, and the first thing we hear about it is a squabble over posts? Maybe. But it is worth remembering who is telling the story: the camp that handed out every seat of power in the country for more than a decade.

Smederevo: a mayor in custody

While Belgrade negotiates power, in Smederevo mayor Jasmina Vojinović has been arrested on the orders of the Basic Public Prosecutor's Office in Smederevo and held for up to 48 hours. No official reason has been given; local media say it concerns irregularities at the city landfill. Also arrested were Miroslav Ilić, director of the municipal company "Zelenilo i groblje" (Greenery and Cemetery), and Ivana Mitrović Stamenković, head of the city administration.

The arrest came only ten days after Vojinović threw a group of citizens out of her office - people who had come to remove her by force and take Vučić's portrait off the wall. Media close to the old government immediately called the arrest terror and revenge by the new authorities.

The Balkans know this scene by heart: a new government, old officials in custody, and then the question - justice or revenge? The answer will not come from the TV studio shouting "vendetta". It will come from the courts, usually many months later, when the cameras have long moved on to another story.

The old government in a new role

Vučić, now cast as opposition leader, claimed on Instagram that the defence and security sector is being "dismantled on the orders of foreign intelligence services". Vojislav Šešelj, for his part, warns that foreign investors are fleeing a country "pushed into chaos" and asks what will be left if the new government drives out the Chinese and the Russians. He calls the student plenums a "totalitarianism" in which nobody knows who decides.

The irony is hard to miss: the vocabulary of foreign services and chaos was for a long time aimed at the students in the streets. Now that same vocabulary comes from the opposition benches. In Zagreb they are already carefully analysing what will happen to Serbia's defence policy, and the question for the whole region is whether Serbia is getting a different state or just new people in the old chairs. The first answer arrives on Tuesday, when the highest seat in the chamber is set to go to someone who until now stood in front of a blackboard.