BELGRADE — Brussels has lost its man in Belgrade.

The opposition Student List’s landslide victory on Sunday ended Aleksandar Vučić’s 12-year run as the EU’s key interlocutor in Serbia. For more than a decade, every step of the candidate country’s accession process and trade negotiations had to pass through him.

“Aleksandar Vučić acted like the go-to person for everything while ignoring all the laws in the country, including the constitution,” Jugoslav Gašić, an assistant professor in medicine at several universities and soon-to-be MP, said in an interview.

When POLITICO reached him, Gašić was in the middle of grading student papers — a fitting snapshot of a new parliamentary majority made up largely of professors, doctors and other political novices.

The Student List won an outright parliamentary majority at the weekend: a stunning result for a leaderless movement born out of protests.

The party’s first order of business will be undoing much the legacy of Vučić and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), starting with reversing years of rule-of-law rollbacks. But it will also reset Serbia’s relationship with Brussels, which the Student List argues the former leader managed more as a transactional tool than a genuine path to EU membership.

“Ultimately, [Vučić] always represented his own interests and not the interests of Serbia,” said Gašić.

Representatives for the SNS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Even among Serbia’s most committed pro-Europeans, Brussels’ willingness to route all progress through Vučić personally has left a bitter aftertaste.

“The key lesson that should be drawn from the case of Serbia is that the EU can very easily lose credibility and integrity if it ignores the causes of democratic backsliding in a country,” said Srdjan Majstorović, chairman of the governing board of the European Policy Center (CEP), a think tank.

According to CEP data published earlier this year, as many 41.6% of citizens believe the EU is more interested in pursuing its own political and economic interests in the region than improving the state of democracy and the rule of law in the country.

For years, anytime non-governmental organizations, journalists or activists argued that Brussels should try to include other voices in the EU negotiation process, they were told “that there was no alternative to the regime in Serbia,” Majstorović continued.

The Student List’s election program casts the EU as Serbia’s most important economic partner and pledged to deepen Belgrade’s existing strategic partnerships with EU members such as Greece, Italy, Hungary and France, while seeking closer bilateral ties with other European capitals.

It does not, however, explicitly name EU membership as an immediate goal.

Gašić wouldn’t be drawn on concrete aims for the Serbia-EU relationship, but said: “We don’t want to be cut off by Europe. We don’t want to be an isolated island.”

“I respect how well-ordered they are, the rule of law and democratic principles,” he added. “Yet I think we need to reset our priorities with the EU, where we consider Serbia’s interests first. A one-sided approach doesn’t foster long-term cooperation.”

The Student List grew out of a mass protest movement sparked by a 2024 railway station roof collapse that killed 16 people. Students blamed the deaths on corruption in state construction contracts and began blockading universities, and within months the protests had swelled into the largest Serbia had seen in decades.

Brussels’ response was muted as students marched across the country, with EU officials largely avoided criticizing Vučić directly. EU flags were conspicuously absent from the demonstrations.

The European Commission didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article.

“The Commission must first restore its long-lost credibility after years of propping up Vučić,” said Djordje Bojović, a foreign policy advisor for Greens in the European Parliament.

He said that Serbia has long been demonized and struggled to reinvent its image since the 1990s, an image “only further cemented by Vučić’s repressive authoritarianism.”

Despite those concerns, Serbia’s economic ties with Europe flourished during Vučić’s time in power, with the country becoming one of the region’s leading destinations for foreign investment.

Under Vučić, Serbia went from about €750 million in foreign direct investment in 2012 to more than €30 billion over the following decade, more than the rest of the Western Balkans combined.

In Brussels, figures such as Bojović and representatives of the opposition parties would plead with institutions such as the Parliament and the Commission to meet with them or take their concerns seriously.

“Vučić had convinced all of them that the opposition is not worth talking to and that they’re not credible,” Bojović said.

Now, with SNS firmly relegated to the opposition, Brussels will need to rethink how it works with Serbia. To many Serbians, the EU has 12 years of looking the other way to answer for first.

WARSAW — Poland’s lower chamber of parliament approved two bills that would loosen the country’s strict abortion restrictions Tuesday evening, marking a breakthrough for Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s coalition nearly three years after it took power, promising to restore reproductive rights.

The measures, which are likely to be vetoed by opposition-aligned President Karol Nawrocki, would end criminal penalties for helping a woman obtain an abortion and re-legalize terminations involving severe fetal abnormalities, undoing one of the crucial elements of Poland’s near-total abortion ban.

“The state trusts women. A woman who terminates her own pregnancy is already exempt from criminal punishment. It’s time to stop punishing everyone who loves us, worries about us and respects our choices,” Katarzyna Kotula, Poland’s government equality commissioner and a lawmaker from the Left, said on X.

Still, neither bill would allow abortion on request up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, as Tusk’s Civic Coalition promised during the 2023 election campaign. The multi-party coalition includes many conservatives and lacks agreement on the liberalization going this far.

Both bills now move from the lower chamber, or the Sejm, to the Senate, where they seem poised to pass, but their eventual fate remains uncertain. President Karol Nawrocki, an ally of the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, said before his election in 2025 that he would not sign legislation easing abortion rules.

“By refusing to sign [the abortion] legislation, the president is hurting people,” Włodzimierz Czarzasty, speaker of the Sejm, said Tuesday before the votes. “If he wants to hurt women, he will hurt them. I think women will see that and hear that.”

Tusk’s coalition government will likely keep turning up the heat on the president and PiS if Nawrocki blocks the liberalization, as he has said he would.

Overriding a presidential veto requires a three-fifths majority in the Sejm that the Tusk-led coalition doesn’t have. The proposals that passed Tuesday lingered in a parliamentary committee for two years before surfacing, spurred by the campaign heating up 12 months before the next general election, slated for late 2027.

Overturning restrictions

At the parliamentary level, ending criminal penalties for helping women with abortion passed with 217 votes in favor, 213 against and three abstentions. The other bill won a slightly clearer majority of 233 for, 203 against and a single abstention.

The first bill would decriminalize assisting or encouraging an abortion performed outside legally permitted grounds, an offense which currently carries sentences of up to three years in prison. It would also protect doctors, nurses and midwives from prosecution when they terminate a pregnancy because of a threat to the woman’s life or health or strong indications of a serious, irreversible fetal condition.

The second bill would restore the right to terminate a pregnancy when doctors identify a severe and irreversible fetal abnormality or an incurable illness threatening the fetus’s viability. It would also set deadlines for hospitals to provide lawful abortions and require written explanations for refusals.

Women’s rights organizations were skeptical about the bills being a breakthrough, saying the reforms fall far short of granting Polish women the access to abortion available in most of the EU, where pregnancies can generally be terminated on request during the first trimester. 

“What does this mean for women who need abortions now? Nothing, because none of these projects would help them,” Legalna Aborcja (Legal Abortion) NGO said on X.

Education Minister Barbara Nowacka, acknowledging the incremental nature of the change, said she believed women should be able to decide, unconditionally, whether and how many children they have.

“But I voted for it and will always vote for every change, even the smallest one, that brings Polish women closer to full rights over their own lives.”

Poland does permit abortion where pregnancy threatens a woman’s health or life or results from a criminal act, including rape or incest. In October 2020, the Constitutional Tribunal, dominated by judges appointed under the PiS government, struck down the additional ground for serious fetal abnormalities, which one of the bills passed tonight restores.

The ruling, effective from January 2021, prompted huge street protests and dealt a lasting blow to PiS’ standing in the polls, contributing to the party’s eventual loss of power in the 2023 election.

Reversing the restrictions became a defining issue for Tusk’s pro-European camp ahead of the October 2023 election. But the governing agreement with the more conservative Polish People’s Party (PSL) and Poland 2050 prevented that. Some PSL and Poland 2050 lawmakers voted against the two bills tonight.

In July 2024, the Sejm rejected an attempt to decriminalize assistance with abortion by 218 votes to 215, after most PSL lawmakers joined the right-wing opposition in voting against it.