Denis MacShane / Nov 2026
Image: Shutterstock
It was said of the French Bourbon kings that they forgot nothing and learnt nothing. Today the Bourbons are alive and well and living in Belgrade where the Balkans once again is producing self-destructive politics to the delight of Vladimir Putin who relishes seeing the finger-wagging Europeans unable to bring peace and a European future to this corner of their continent.
There currently is a lot of excitement about the student movement that won the elections in Serbia because it removed Vučić from office. Clearly the hope of many is that Serbia is going to experience a replay of the Hungarian experience after Orban’s electoral defeat.
But for that to happen Serbia has to accept that Kosovo has the right to exist. 120 UN member states recognise Kosovo as do 22 out of 27 EU member states. 5 EU states which follow orthodox Christian rites still refuse to accept that Kosovo is never going to return to Serb rule.
The small Balkan nation and state that was the last to emerge from the wreckage of the former Yugoslavia following terrible violence forever linked to the Serb leader Slobodan Milošević accused of war crimes including the ethnic cleansing which consisted of shooting in cold blood of up to 10,000 Kosovar men and raping 20,000 Kosovar women in the short war of Kosovo liberation 1998-99
The war ended after an intervention by Nato troops and the arrival of UN mandated administrators. Milošević was sent to the Hague to stand trial for his massacres. His media chief, Alexander Vučić, then took over as president of Serbia. Vučić and used the Serbian state’s diplomatic networks to continue to portray Kosovo as just a breakaway province of Serbia that should return to rule by Belgrade. In that effort, Vučić had the backing of Moscow and Beijng.
But now, with his defeat in the national election by a university based political movement of students and their professors, it is widely assumed that Serbia will just become a normal European state and finally close the chapter of pretending Kosovo has no right to exist.
However, politics in the sense of agreement on a new government and what its program and policies should be has yet to get under way. Although it was called a “Students Movement” there seem to be large number of older professors who are doing the talking especially on maintaining the Milošević-Vučić line on Kosovo.
Radomir Saičić, a 65 year old chemistry professor and one of founders of the Student List and the man who announced its victory, told Serb national TV three days before the vote that Kosovo is “temporarily occupied territory”. On the Student List movement’s website Kosovo is branded a “so-called republic”, its government “provisional institutions of self-government”, and the Serb students pledge to bar it from international organisations. This is return to pure Milošević-Putin language at odds with every European democracy that has recognised Kosovo.
The Students programme names Russia as the “traditional partner” for “open questions”, including any discussion of Kosovo among them. Putin’s view on Kosovo is that like Ukraine it has no right to exist as an independent B state like the others that emerged in the 1990s as Belgrade’s power and belief in Serb supremacy within the wider Yugoslavia evaporated
The democratic world gushed with pleasure at the Students’ Movement in Serbia which seemed to be marching in parallel with Hungary’s civil society movement that removed Viktor Orbán, as the autocratic leader of Hungary.
No government has yet been formed in Serbia and confirmed by the newly elected Serb parliament which has yet to meet and elect its officers. Perhaps there will be a turn to European values as a government finally emerges in Belgrade. But the current statements by the leadership of the movement that won the election suggests that Serbia has not yet shed its ultra-nationalist sense of superiority over its non-Orthodox neighbours.
Denis MacShane is the former Minister of Europe and author of “Why Kosovo Still Matters” (Haus, 2011)
