Sunday's election ended Aleksandar Vucic's 14-year grip on Serbia through the Serbian Progressive Party. The Student List's historic victory marks the most significant political rupture in the Western Balkans since Croatia's HDZ lost power. But anyone expecting Belgrade to pivot sharply toward Brussels — or away from Moscow — is misreading the sequencing. The unanimous expert consensus is striking: domestic institutional repair comes first, and it will consume most of the new government's bandwidth. Aleksandar Popov of the Centre for Regionalism in Novi Sad describes a system that has "captured all democratic institutions" — judiciary, prosecution, police, media. Rebuilding these from the inside while the SNS apparatus still permeates the state is the kind of grinding, unglamorous work that doesn't make international headlines but determines whether anything else is possible. Regional relations with Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo sit in various states of disrepair, all traceable to the Vucic playbook of manufacturing enemies for domestic consumption. Popov describes a feedback loop with Zagreb where "poisoned arrows" flew both ways, while a quiet convergence between Belgrade and Zagreb on carving up Bosnia through Republika Srpska and a third entity operated underneath the public hostility. Breaking these patterns requires not just new leadership but a fundamentally different theory of domestic legitimacy. Foreign policy analyst Vuk Vuksanovic of King's College London delivers the coldest read: of all Serbian public policy domains, foreign policy will transform the least. The structural incentives haven't changed. Serbia still needs preferential Russian gas prices. The Kosovo dispute remains unresolved. Parts of the Serbian public remain skeptical of Western institutions. Moscow never fully trusted Vucic anyway — he was simply "the devil they knew." Russian influence will decline in specific channels: the end of uncritical glorification in SNS-controlled tabloids, downgraded intelligence cooperation. But the new government has no incentive to join EU sanctions or adopt a hawkish posture toward Moscow. The Israel dimension adds another layer. Under Vucic, Serbia built a partnership with Netanyahu's government centered on arms trade and surveillance technology. Analyst Bosko Jaksic expects the new government to maintain cooperation but scrutinize recently concluded contracts — particularly Serbian ammunition exports to Israel and Israeli surveillance equipment flowing back to Belgrade. Netanyahu has now lost a second authoritarian-nationalist European ally after Viktor Orban's fall in Hungary. The ammunition question is revealing. Under Vucic, Serbian munitions flowed indirectly to Ukraine — a move the opposition viewed as a cynical ploy to buy Western tolerance for domestic authoritarianism. With that transaction no longer necessary, the ammunition pipeline's future is genuinely uncertain. Serbia will maintain its policy of not recognizing Crimea and Donbas annexation, but the instrumental logic behind weapons transfers has evaporated. The overarching shift is from Serbia's policy of "sitting on multiple chairs" — a strategy Jaksic says brought more harm than good — toward a more coherent EU alignment. But coherence requires functioning institutions at home, credible rule of law, and repaired relationships with every neighbour. The international community should calibrate expectations accordingly: this is the start of a multi-year institutional rebuild, not a geopolitical realignment on a Sunday night.
