Recently in Politics
October Election Outcomes: Can Authoritarianism Compete with High Voter Turnout?
Serbia’s Students for the Win!
A new era in Serbian politics began this month as the ‘Student List’ campaign ousted authoritarian president Aleksandar Vučić after 12 years. Pollsters and the election commission put turnout close to 70%, the highest since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992. The student list won 140 seats in parliament while Vučić’s party won only 103. The student list will now hold a majority of seats in the Serbian parliament.
The Serbian student movement began in November 2024 shortly after a concrete canopy collapsed at the Novi Sad railway station, killing 16 people. Protests over evidence of slipshod construction, fraud, and corruption behind the roof collapse eventually turned into a broad, anti-government, student-run movement that spread across the country.
Student-led protests grew bigger and bigger, taking over the capital city of Belgrade, until Vučić finally agreed to resign the presidency last month and gamble on snap elections. The students then took their movement to the ballot box, enlisting 250 candidates to run in this month’s election, one for each seat in parliament. The candidates came from all walks of life and included athletes, academics, and farmers who campaigned in every province.
Together with the students, the candidates campaigned on rebuilding Serbia’s economy and restoring its democracy after twelve years of authoritarian rule. They faced an uphill battle, however, against an SNS that controlled nearly every broadcast channel and wielded ministries and other state institutions as political tools.
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Recently in Business
The Resignation That Became a Rally
A minister quits in protest because the Treasury won’t fund the armed forces properly. Six weeks later, he’s running the Treasury. That’s what happened when Prime Minister Andy Burnham, Britain’s seventh PM in ten years, named John Healey his Chancellor of the Exchequer – the same Healey who had resigned as defence secretary in June, telling colleagues the Treasury had been “unwilling” to find the money to keep the country safe.
Markets didn’t wait for a Budget speech to react. On the first trading day after the appointment, Babcock International rose 6.8%, QinetiQ gained 4.5%, and BAE Systems added 3.1% – well ahead of a European defence index up only about 1% that same day. In the same session, gilt yields hit fresh two-month highs and sterling gave up its early gains, as bond traders asked the question equity traders skipped: how does this actually get paid for?
It’s an unusually clean case of political conviction being read directly as a trading signal – one that cheered defence investors and unnerved bondholders in the very same afternoon.
Why the market reacted this way
The appointment wrong-footed Westminster; Healey hadn’t been seen as a serious contender for the Treasury, and putting a minister who’d just resigned over spending levels in charge of setting them was, on paper, an odd choice. Under Keir Starmer, Healey’s fight with the Treasury over defence money ended in his departure. Under Burnham, the same fight appears to have propelled him into the building he was arguing with.
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