The Steward of the People’s Resources: What the Church Asks After Serbia’s Students Defeat Vučić

On Sunday night, Aleksandar Vučić conceded that Serbia’s Student List had beaten him, ending a run of more than a decade in which he governed the country as prime minister or president. The movement that beat him began at a railway station in Novi Sad, where a concrete canopy fell in 2024 and killed 16 people. Protesters claimed that it was through corruption that the canopy was even built there. Most of the coverage since has asked which way Serbia will now lean: toward Brussels, Moscow or Washington. The Church asks about the thing that started it all: what corruption does to a people, and to whom public office actually belongs.

The News Story

Aleksandar Vučić, who has dominated Serbian politics as prime minister or president since 2014, conceded defeat on Sunday night, October 25, after a snap parliamentary election handed a majority to the Student List, a citizens’ group that grew out of nearly two years of anti-corruption protests.¹

Vučić spoke about 90 minutes after the polls closed. “It is clear that we have lost these elections, the Student List has won,” he said in a televised address. He estimated that the Student List had received about 2.2 million votes against roughly 1.72 million for his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), and projected 135 to 140 seats for the Student List in the 250-seat National Assembly, with about 105 for his own side.²

On Monday, the Republic Electoral Commission released preliminary figures from 8,077 of 8,392 polling stations. They gave the Student List 52.54 percent and the SNS-led United Serbia list 39.29 percent. Projections from those returns give the Student List about 140 seats and United Serbia 103, with the remaining seats going to Hungarian, Albanian and Bosniak minority lists. A majority requires 126. Turnout was 68.78 percent, according to the commission, the highest in more than 30 years. Serbia has about 6.4 million registered voters, and long lines were reported at polling stations at home and abroad.³

The movement traces back to November 1, 2024, when a concrete canopy collapsed at the newly renovated railway station in Novi Sad and killed 16 people. The renovation was part of a project financed under China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and protesters blamed shoddy work and corruption. Demonstrations led by university students spread across the country and drew in professors, doctors, farmers and workers. Vučić called the protesters “blockaders” and accused them of trying to destabilize Serbia.⁴

The Student List has no formal party leader and named no candidate for prime minister. Its campaign was led by Ilija Srdanović, a cardiologist and professor at the University of Novi Sad’s Faculty of Medicine, who is widely seen as the likeliest choice. Its candidates include professors, actors, farmers and former basketball player Dejan Bodiroga. Vučić resigned the presidency on September 27 to run at the head of his party’s list for prime minister. Assembly Speaker Ana Brnabić is acting president, and an extraordinary presidential election must be held by December 27. The new assembly must convene within 30 days of final results, and a government must be formed within 90 days after that.⁵

Independent monitors reported dozens of irregularities, including voters photographing their ballots and attempted vote buying, according to the Associated Press. In his concession Vučić blamed independent media, unnamed European governments and what he called an “American deep state.” He said his party would go into opposition.⁶

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa said the EU stood ready “to support reforms on the rule of law, media freedom, the fight against corruption.” Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos wrote that “the door to the EU is open.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow “highly value[s]” Vučić’s contribution to relations and hoped Serbia’s new leaders would see cooperation with Russia as in the country’s interest, according to The Epoch Times. The Washington Examiner reported that the result leaves the Trump administration, which Vučić had courted, in an awkward position. No formal U.S. statement had been reported by Monday night.⁷

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

Sixteen Dead at the Station

On November 1, 2024, a concrete canopy at the newly renovated railway station in Novi Sad gave way and killed 16 people.⁸ The victims had done nothing more dangerous than wait for a train. The renovation was part of a project financed under China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and the protesters who gathered outside soon began to say that shoddy work and corruption had put that concrete over those people’s heads.⁹ I can’t tell you from here whether the charge is true in every particular. That belongs to Serbia’s courts. But it is the charge that brought students into the streets, kept them there for nearly two years, and on Sunday handed them a majority in the National Assembly on the heels of the highest voter turnout in more than 30 years.¹⁰

Aleksandar Vučić had governed as prime minister or president since 2014. He called the protesters “blockaders” and accused them of trying to destabilize the country.¹¹ On Sunday night, about 90 minutes after the polls closed, he conceded.¹²

Most of the commentary since then has weighed what the result means for Brussels, Moscow, and Washington. That matters. But the question the students kept asking was simpler and much older. It is a question that the Church has an answer to. What happens to a country when public office starts to behave like private property?

One of the Most Serious Deformities

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church does not soften this. “Among the deformities of the democratic system, political corruption is one of the most serious because it betrays at one and the same time both moral principles and the norms of social justice.”¹³ Notice the double betrayal. Corruption is a personal sin, a breach of the moral law by the official who takes and the man who gives. And it is an injustice against the whole people, because the thing being traded belongs to them.

The Compendium then describes what corruption does over time, and it reads like a summary of Serbia’s last two years. It “causes a growing distrust with respect to public institutions, bringing about a progressive disaffection in the citizens with regard to politics and its representatives, with a resulting weakening of institutions.” Representative bodies “become an arena for political bartering between clients’ requests and governmental services,” so that political choices “favour the narrow objectives of those who possess the means to influence these choices.”¹⁴

The Catechism files the same act under the seventh commandment, You shall not steal. Among the things it calls morally illicit are “corruption in which one influences the judgment of those who must make decisions according to law,” the “appropriation and use for private purposes of the common goods of an enterprise,” and, in the very same list, “work poorly done.”¹⁵ That’s a hard list to read beside a collapsed canopy. Corruption is theft. And when what gets stolen is the soundness of a public building, the people who pay for it may be standing underneath it.

Office Belongs to the Governed

Pope Leo XIII saw this clearly in 1891. In Rerum Novarum, he wrote that “both philosophy and the Gospel concur in laying down that the object of the government of the State should be, not the advantage of the ruler, but the benefit of those over whom he is placed.” Because the power to rule comes from God and is “a participation in His, the highest of all sovereignties,” it “should be exercised as the power of God is exercised,” with “a fatherly solicitude.”¹⁶

The Compendium puts the same truth in the language of administration. “Being at the service of its citizens, the State is the steward of the people’s resources, which it must administer with a view to the common good.” The work of a public official, it says, is to be understood “as an act of generous assistance for citizens, undertaken with a spirit of service.”¹⁷ A steward manages what belongs to someone else. A railway station rebuilt with public money belongs to the people who walk through it, and the official who signs off on its repair is handling their property and, as Novi Sad learned, their lives.

St. Thomas Aquinas drew the line between just and unjust rule in exactly these terms. A tyrannical government “is not just,” he wrote, “because it is directed, not to the common good, but to the private good of the ruler.”¹⁸ To be fair to Vučić, he left office through a ballot and conceded the same night, and that counts for a great deal. Thomas’s point reaches past any one man. Every office drifts toward its holder’s private good unless something pulls it back.

Who Disturbs the Peace

So what pulls it back? The Compendium’s answer sounds almost pointed when you set it beside a man who held power for 14 years. It names participation, and with it “the occasional rotation of political leaders in order to forestall the establishment of hidden privileges.” Participation, it says, “is a duty to be fulfilled consciously by all, with responsibility and with a view to the common good.”¹⁹

That changes how we should see what the students did. Their government called them blockaders, men and women who disturb the peace. Thomas asks a sharper question about who is really disturbing it. He condemned sedition as a mortal sin because it attacks “the unity of law and common good.” But he added at once: “Those, however, who defend the common good, and withstand the seditious party, are not themselves seditious.”²⁰ The test is the common good, and then the means.

Pope St. John Paul II supplied the means. In Sollicitudo Rei Socialis he counted among the “positive signs in the contemporary world” the “public demonstrations on the social scene which, without recourse to violence, present their own needs and rights in the face of the inefficiency or corruption of the public authorities.”²¹ He wrote that in 1987, before the Berlin Wall fell, and it describes Serbia closely. The students marched, kept marching, and when an election came they built a list of doctors, professors, farmers and athletes and won it. In the same letter John Paul hoped nations would “replace corrupt, dictatorial and authoritarian forms of government by democratic and participatory ones,” because the health of a political community lies in “the free and responsible participation of all citizens in public affairs, in the rule of law and in respect for the promotion of human rights.”²²

The Same Test Applies to the Winners

Here’s the hard part, and the Student List should hear it from a friend. Corruption tempts every office, whoever campaigned against it. The Compendium asks for authority “exercised with those virtues that make it possible to put power into practice as service (patience, modesty, moderation, charity, efforts to share),” held by people who accept “the common good, and not prestige or the gaining of personal advantages, as the true goal of their work.”²³

Ilija Srdanović is a cardiologist, and the list he led is full of people who have never held national power.²⁴ That is a strength and a risk. Soon they will control the ministries of finance, justice and internal affairs, and within a year they will be the ones signing contracts for railway stations. Vučić blamed his defeat on independent media, unnamed European governments and an “American deep state,” and monitors recorded dozens of irregularities in the vote itself.²⁵ A government elected to end that kind of politics will be judged by two things: whether it keeps the press free when the press turns on it, and whether it lets the courts follow the Novi Sad case wherever it leads, including toward its own friends.

What I’d Watch

Watch the final count, and whether the new National Assembly convenes within the 30 days the law allows.²⁶ Watch whom the Student List chooses as prime minister, and whom it puts in the justice ministry. Watch the presidential election that must be held by December 27. And watch the Novi Sad investigation, because the families of the 16 have waited nearly two years for an answer, and they are owed one.

And, as always, pray. Pray for the 16 who died at the station and for the families who still grieve them. Pray for the students and the professors who led them, that they govern with the integrity they demanded. Pray for Aleksandar Vučić, that he finds in opposition a peace that power did not give him. And pray for the people of Serbia, Orthodox and Catholic and all the rest, that the Lord who “loves righteousness and justice” (Psalm 33:5) gives them leaders who remember whose resources they hold.

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This story turns on the Church’s teaching against political corruption: public office is a stewardship of the people’s resources, held for the governed and never for the one who governs.

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Notes

1. ↑ “Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia’s Putin-Endorsed Long-Time Leader, Concedes Election Defeat in Major Political Shift,” Associated Press via CBS News, October 25, 2026, cbsnews.com; Ljubiša Ivanović, “Student List Wins Serbian Election in Political Earthquake as Vučić Concedes Defeat,” Euronews, October 25, 2026, euronews.com; Armin Aljovic, “Aleksandar Vucic, the Serbian Leader Brought Down by Students,” Al Jazeera, October 26, 2026, aljazeera.com.
2. ↑ Ivanović, “Student List Wins Serbian Election”; Associated Press, “Vucic Concedes Election Defeat”; “Serbian President Concedes Election Defeat to Student-Led Coalition,” The Epoch Times, October 26, 2026, theepochtimes.com.
3. ↑ Muamer Tanovic, “Serbia After Vucic: Who Will Be PM and When Will a Government Be Formed?,” Al Jazeera, October 26, 2026, aljazeera.com; Associated Press, “Vucic Concedes Election Defeat.”
4. ↑ Associated Press, “Vucic Concedes Election Defeat”; The Epoch Times, “Serbian President Concedes”; Aljovic, “The Serbian Leader Brought Down by Students”; Jovana Gec, “Serbia’s Populist Strongman Vucic Outplayed All His Opponents. Then the Students Came,” Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, October 26, 2026, pbs.org.
5. ↑ Tanovic, “Serbia After Vucic”; The Epoch Times, “Serbian President Concedes”; Aljovic, “The Serbian Leader Brought Down by Students.”
6. ↑ Associated Press, “Vucic Concedes Election Defeat”; The Epoch Times, “Serbian President Concedes.”
7. ↑ Luca Bertuzzi, “EU Hails Serbia’s Political Upheaval After Student Group Ends Vučić’s Rule,” Euronews, October 26, 2026, euronews.com; The Epoch Times, “Serbian President Concedes”; Brady Knox, “Longtime Serbian Leader Vucic’s Defeat at the Hands of Student Movement Leaves Washington in Awkward Position,” Washington Examiner, October 26, 2026, washingtonexaminer.com.
8. ↑ Associated Press, “Vucic Concedes Election Defeat”; Aljovic, “The Serbian Leader Brought Down by Students.”
9. ↑ The Epoch Times, “Serbian President Concedes.”
10. ↑ Tanovic, “Serbia After Vucic.”
11. ↑ Aljovic, “The Serbian Leader Brought Down by Students.”
12. ↑ Associated Press, “Vucic Concedes Election Defeat.”
13. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 411, vatican.va.
14. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 411.
15. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2409, vatican.va.
16. ↑ Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum: On Capital and Labor (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 15, 1891), no. 35, vatican.va.
17. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 412.
18. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 42, a. 2, ad 3, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
19. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 189.
20. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 42, a. 2.
21. ↑ Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Sollicitudo Rei Socialis: For the Twentieth Anniversary of Populorum Progressio (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, December 30, 1987), no. 39, vatican.va.
22. ↑ Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, no. 44.
23. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 410.
24. ↑ Tanovic, “Serbia After Vucic”; The Epoch Times, “Serbian President Concedes.”
25. ↑ Associated Press, “Vucic Concedes Election Defeat.”
26. ↑ Tanovic, “Serbia After Vucic.”

Books Cited

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• Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, Complete Set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)