The Student List Won Serbia's Election, and on Sanctions Against Russia It Offers "Dialogue": An Answer That Says Nothing

Serbia has new winners, but still no new prime minister. And now, it seems, there's no clear answer either to the question Brussels has been asking for years: will Belgrade impose sanctions on Russia? Ilija Srdanović, who headed the Student List that won the snap parliamentary election on 25 October, gave this answer in an interview:

"Of course that will be a dialogue within our community. All questions of international relations must be resolved through open dialogue with our citizens. That cannot be decided by one man. We made an effort, and we succeeded, to make sure a system of rule in which one man decides never comes back to life."

Sounds democratic. Except it's not an answer, it's a postponement. Right after the victory, some people from the Student List publicly said there would be no sanctions - Radomir Saičić dismissed the possibility without a second thought. Now what comes from the top of the list isn't "no", but "we'll talk about it". In Serbian politics, a nuance like that is rarely just a nuance.

A warning came from Zagreb too. Arsen Bauk, a member of the Croatian parliament, said the winning group is heterogeneous, with different views on both the future and the past. "We'll see which current prevails and how decisions will be made, because there's no classic political party there, they don't even have a candidate for prime minister. This was obviously an experiment," Bauk said.

That's the core of it. A movement still looking for its prime minister now has to decide on Serbia's toughest foreign policy question. "Dialogue with citizens" is a nice phrase when you're deciding on parking in a neighbourhood. When you're deciding whether a candidate country follows Brussels or stays close to Moscow, it starts to look like running away from an answer.

For Macedonia, this is no distant topic. Skopje adopted the EU sanctions against Russia long ago and ended up on Moscow's list of "unfriendly states". Belgrade spent years balancing between the two sides. Will the new government change that balance - or just give it a nicer name?

Srdanović says the era when one man decided is over. Good. But when everyone decides, someone still has to say what the decision is.