It was an amazing achievement for the students list movement to get such a diverse group of new politicians elected. I’m very curious to see how government formation without a figurehead/leader goes. Most parliamentary democracies assume you are electing a person with the knowledge/hope the party leader will be sitting in the big chair at the end. Most also put a lot of power in that person’s hands with backbenchers sidelined from the day to day running.
I really hope their success carries over into governance.
IMO more than the academic prowess, the key positive is that the newly elected representatives will have different priorities and perspectives, and be younger. I can’t help but thinking that young people that went through high achieving secondary studying must have internalised delayed gratification and long term thinking by necessity, and be at least trying to improve things for the longer term rather than short term gain.
Then again, I might just be hoping it is so. Given that, sadly, similar movements elsewhere (perhaps with not as much laurel leaves) have quickly fallen apart. (5 star movement in Italy and Piraty in Czech Republic come to mind)
Just because they are academics and experts in some scientific or technical field does not mean they are immune to corruption and abuse of power. Arguably they are just are vulnerable to these things.
There is often resistance to technocratic forms of government that, in my opinion, misses the mark, appealing to either a "they don't understand the real world" or a "we tried this before" argument, both of which deliberately ignore the "policy is personnel", reflecting the idea that their moral character is perhaps the most defining aspect when addressing large-scale change.
It is clear from populist approaches that conducting business-as-usual without any foundational knowledge is dangerous and leads to corruption and regulatory capture, and it is equally true that purely rationalist efforts neglect the messy nature of political governance and social complexity, leading to an overly narrow idea that ends up not serving the people it claims to support.
I expect that this government will rise or fall based on its ability to remain internally cohesive while also trying to resist (and hopefully influence) the many pressures that will be put on it by the regional and global vested interests.
Since they are not a political party, the issue will be who will run the institutions. They have 250 people on the election list. Institutions are also made of people. I believe these people are smart and know what they are doing, but they cannot do all of it themselves. I support this "experiment", but it will be interesting to see where they will find hundreds if not thousands of people to run the country. An established party has members as a pool to pick from.
I used to believe very hard in technocratic governments where experts lead instead of politicians merely consulting with them as most countries do (or pretend to do to give cover to whatever they'd do anyway). Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average but I can't even remember sources, just that after reading about I became less of a believer. I really want to believe it has to be better than having old people who's whole career is politics but who knows.
Rationality has to be guided by common sense. I’m sure Nazi Germany had many extraordinarily capable technocratic leaders but we have those in ample supply and with the computers now reasoning with us I don’t think we need more of those. Rationality is a solved problem as far as I’m concerned. We have other issues. We lack a coherent moral vision, societal cohesion, stability, sanity. Once you lose those it doesn’t really matter what system you implement, it’s just delaying the inevitable.
Seeing the billions of people who believe in the imaginary, and a few millions of these fight and kill others over these imaginary things, I would say, rationality is not a solved problem.
> I’m sure Nazi Germany had many extraordinarily capable technocratic leaders [...]
Actually, not. They had a few left-over from when Germany had a functioning state, but the Nazis were overall fairly incompetent at actually running the country.
Lots of governments just end up with career lawyers and politicians.
They can choose their advisors and their advice.
The more varied experts you can get into parliament, the more likely you have an on the record disagreement from an expert preventing a politician from choosing the incorrect advice that suits them better.
Thats not to say they are going to be any better for corruption, but in todays world there are so many deep silos that governments just completely step over and disregard.
> Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average
Hardly. But it depends on who is on board.
Corruption exists everywhere. Do you think that Vukic was
less corrupt? I am pretty certain you will find many people
in Serbia who want to fix the country. Other Europeans would
ask: why let only poor countries join? They drain money from
richer countries. Switzerland and Norway will never join and
they know why. Hint: there is a reason they are rich.
Second hint: they got rich without the EU.
Which country got rich with the EU? I don't know of a single
one. Germany was already wealthy before the EU was founded.
France is now in debt crisis from which it can not escape,
so it will drag the whole EU down.
Estonia and Poland. I’m going to France and Estonia every year, and Estonia seems more developed and comfortable, I’m now seriously thinking of retiring there so good it is
Hint: Norway has oil and Switzerland has been fairly rich for a while. No country got rich with the EU and that's a good sign, otherwise it would probably also imply that many got much poorer. But the living standards for a lot of people certainly went up in comparison to what they had before.
technocratic governments are great when a strong leadership is present that also listens to the technocracy. But it's important to realize that technical skill does not correlate with political skills like consensus building, horse trading, compromise, etc that make governments actually work.
What will happen here will strongly depend on how good these people are at actually playing the game of politics. I don't have any particular reason to be more or less optimistic than any regular slate of politicians.
Whilst politics always exist, how deep it goes varies.
It's entirly possible that the experiment fails because of politics, but it's also possible that the amount of politics is simply lower because people are simply more reasonable.
The last part will come down to vested interest and ideologues.
They need to translate the election victory into
tangible improvements and results. Otherwise
voters in Serbia would not see any difference to
the cleptocracy established by Vukic.
Hungary has this problem by the way - people thought
Péter Magyar will fix, and change, Hungary. Recently
Hungary signed a "we are ultra-right servants of
Trump" in the USA (see https://telex.hu/english/2026/10/30/hungarian-fm-and-rubio-s...), thus validating all those who pointed
out that Peter is just a younger face but the same
Orban 2.0 in the end.
Corruption runs very, very deep. I am also certain the Epstein
network is not only much bigger than known, but has different
actors and beneficiaries. To this day the US court system can
not explain why only Maxwell is in prison. That makes logically -
and logistically - no sense at all.
I mean this specific example seems like a far cry from how horrible the Orban regime was. It’s basically ultra-conservative posturing. And Magyar being super conservative was known ahead of the vote. Granted I am no expert in Hungarian politics, but from this single example it seems a bit intense to call him Orban 2.0.
And I also don’t think you can compare Magyar pre- and post election to the new Serbian elected government at all. But I do agree actually producing enough noticeable change until the next election will be hard for both. It just takes time to unfuck countries.
Can you elaborate? I mean to my limited outsider understanding, Magyar's entire platform "exactly as right wing as Orban, but with less corruption and with proper democratic civil liberties". Does signing some symbolic agreement about "boo antifa" really break with that promise?
Not necessarily, but do you think voting in the guy who held power for 13 years is going to help?
He clearly redirected the railway station maintenance budget to his friends instead, because he assumed the public were suckers who'd vote him back in no matter how badly he fucked up. Then the station canopy collapsed and killed people. Entirely avoidable.
When your leaders are nakedly corrupt, and through sheer luck you still have free and fair elections, you vote those fuckers out. Otherwise they'll fiddle while your country burns.
It looks like the public want someone else in charge, they'll give them a fair shake. Maybe the new lot will direct the treasure more appropriately.
Whilst it seems like a good idea to have academics run government, history has shown that countries run by engineers and scientists tend to end up with some great roads and dams, but failing economically and socially in almost every other way.
At a guess, 30% of the speeches given today in parliaments across the western world were already written/inspired by an LLM. This is somewhat inevitable.
US government-funded pro-opposition outlet BIRN through its Media Ownership Monitor Serbia project admits the central Student List media channels - N1 and Nova S - were created by former US director of the CIA David Petraeus via KKR and former US Ambassador to Serbia Cameron Munter;
The parent United Group was acquired and the media platforms built up from 2013-2014 onward as the center of opposition media in Serbia opposing Serbia’s existing leadership and institutions, and playing a central role in both “student protests” last year and the “Student List” movement this year;
United Group was only recently (earlier this year) acquired by Alpac Capital, but KKR still maintains an undisclosed amount of shares
with the move a likely an attempt to distance US involvement in the media network;
When “leaderless” and “decentralized” protests are praised in the Western media, scroll down in the article where they eventually admit who the leaders and organizations are behind them, perform a simple internet search to identify the key people and investments making them possible to determine whether a movement is indigenous or the product of foreign interference;
Those two channels with limited cable availability had 0 to do with the extremely horizontal and leaderless Student List, that openly stated will do fuck all on the foreign front apart from stopping manufacturing of Israel’s drones.
Btw since you’re “doing your own research” see who supported and even better who installed the former ruling party.
On the one hand, I have no doubt that the US and everyone else able would push their agenda in uncertain times. On the other, imagining that it is all CIA/FSB and so on denies agency to thousands of people who have put in the effort to change thier country.
It was an amazing achievement for the students list movement to get such a diverse group of new politicians elected. I’m very curious to see how government formation without a figurehead/leader goes. Most parliamentary democracies assume you are electing a person with the knowledge/hope the party leader will be sitting in the big chair at the end. Most also put a lot of power in that person’s hands with backbenchers sidelined from the day to day running.
I really hope their success carries over into governance.
IMO more than the academic prowess, the key positive is that the newly elected representatives will have different priorities and perspectives, and be younger. I can’t help but thinking that young people that went through high achieving secondary studying must have internalised delayed gratification and long term thinking by necessity, and be at least trying to improve things for the longer term rather than short term gain.
Then again, I might just be hoping it is so. Given that, sadly, similar movements elsewhere (perhaps with not as much laurel leaves) have quickly fallen apart. (5 star movement in Italy and Piraty in Czech Republic come to mind)
Hopefully the Serbian youths learned from them.
Just because they are academics and experts in some scientific or technical field does not mean they are immune to corruption and abuse of power. Arguably they are just are vulnerable to these things.
There is often resistance to technocratic forms of government that, in my opinion, misses the mark, appealing to either a "they don't understand the real world" or a "we tried this before" argument, both of which deliberately ignore the "policy is personnel", reflecting the idea that their moral character is perhaps the most defining aspect when addressing large-scale change.
It is clear from populist approaches that conducting business-as-usual without any foundational knowledge is dangerous and leads to corruption and regulatory capture, and it is equally true that purely rationalist efforts neglect the messy nature of political governance and social complexity, leading to an overly narrow idea that ends up not serving the people it claims to support.
I expect that this government will rise or fall based on its ability to remain internally cohesive while also trying to resist (and hopefully influence) the many pressures that will be put on it by the regional and global vested interests.
good thing they're stem oriented. serbia can only go up from here.
vs electing lawyers as done in other countries.
Since they are not a political party, the issue will be who will run the institutions. They have 250 people on the election list. Institutions are also made of people. I believe these people are smart and know what they are doing, but they cannot do all of it themselves. I support this "experiment", but it will be interesting to see where they will find hundreds if not thousands of people to run the country. An established party has members as a pool to pick from.
The previous ruling party's pool was more like a sewer, so it's hard to imagine how it could get any worse than it already is.
The idea that people apply for positions and, if they are qualified, they are accepted. At least in theory.
Compare also how the various pirate parties have done around the world.
I used to believe very hard in technocratic governments where experts lead instead of politicians merely consulting with them as most countries do (or pretend to do to give cover to whatever they'd do anyway). Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average but I can't even remember sources, just that after reading about I became less of a believer. I really want to believe it has to be better than having old people who's whole career is politics but who knows.
the most prominent long-term technocratic/meritocratic cases (especially Singapore) rank among the least corrupt countries
I mean Singapore is also a dictatorship which muddies a useful comparison, but I didn't realise it was so strong on corruption.
International observers have never found flaw with Singapore's elections, have they?
> but I didn't realise it was so strong on corruption.
That's literally a core part of the brand, isn't it?
I'd imagine not having to deal with PR to your voters would make going by merit easier, not harder
What makes you think Singaporean politicians don't have to deal with voters?
Mugabe had seven academic degrees.
Rationality has to be guided by common sense. I’m sure Nazi Germany had many extraordinarily capable technocratic leaders but we have those in ample supply and with the computers now reasoning with us I don’t think we need more of those. Rationality is a solved problem as far as I’m concerned. We have other issues. We lack a coherent moral vision, societal cohesion, stability, sanity. Once you lose those it doesn’t really matter what system you implement, it’s just delaying the inevitable.
Seeing the billions of people who believe in the imaginary, and a few millions of these fight and kill others over these imaginary things, I would say, rationality is not a solved problem.
> I’m sure Nazi Germany had many extraordinarily capable technocratic leaders [...]
Actually, not. They had a few left-over from when Germany had a functioning state, but the Nazis were overall fairly incompetent at actually running the country.
[delayed]
National Socialism was right but now we have Claude so it isn't necessary anymore has to earn some sort of award.
Either the Delusional Leftist Against AI Bro Award or the Delusional AI Bro Against Leftist Award.
I mean its just a practicality.
Lots of governments just end up with career lawyers and politicians.
They can choose their advisors and their advice.
The more varied experts you can get into parliament, the more likely you have an on the record disagreement from an expert preventing a politician from choosing the incorrect advice that suits them better.
Thats not to say they are going to be any better for corruption, but in todays world there are so many deep silos that governments just completely step over and disregard.
> Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average
Hardly. But it depends on who is on board.
Corruption exists everywhere. Do you think that Vukic was less corrupt? I am pretty certain you will find many people in Serbia who want to fix the country. Other Europeans would ask: why let only poor countries join? They drain money from richer countries. Switzerland and Norway will never join and they know why. Hint: there is a reason they are rich. Second hint: they got rich without the EU.
Which country got rich with the EU? I don't know of a single one. Germany was already wealthy before the EU was founded. France is now in debt crisis from which it can not escape, so it will drag the whole EU down.
Estonia and Poland. I’m going to France and Estonia every year, and Estonia seems more developed and comfortable, I’m now seriously thinking of retiring there so good it is
Hint: Norway has oil and Switzerland has been fairly rich for a while. No country got rich with the EU and that's a good sign, otherwise it would probably also imply that many got much poorer. But the living standards for a lot of people certainly went up in comparison to what they had before.
> Which country got rich with the EU?
Poland and the other new members in the East, probably?
Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Poland, Lithuania.
>Which country got rich with the EU?
Poland? >250 billion Euros received in subsidies since joining the EU; almost any construction you walk by has the "Funded by EU" poster next to it.
I think the massive service and outsourcing industry would also not have been possible (at the current scale) without EU membership.
Poland? Baltics?
technocratic governments are great when a strong leadership is present that also listens to the technocracy. But it's important to realize that technical skill does not correlate with political skills like consensus building, horse trading, compromise, etc that make governments actually work.
What will happen here will strongly depend on how good these people are at actually playing the game of politics. I don't have any particular reason to be more or less optimistic than any regular slate of politicians.
Whilst politics always exist, how deep it goes varies.
It's entirly possible that the experiment fails because of politics, but it's also possible that the amount of politics is simply lower because people are simply more reasonable.
The last part will come down to vested interest and ideologues.
They need to translate the election victory into tangible improvements and results. Otherwise voters in Serbia would not see any difference to the cleptocracy established by Vukic.
Hungary has this problem by the way - people thought Péter Magyar will fix, and change, Hungary. Recently Hungary signed a "we are ultra-right servants of Trump" in the USA (see https://telex.hu/english/2026/10/30/hungarian-fm-and-rubio-s...), thus validating all those who pointed out that Peter is just a younger face but the same Orban 2.0 in the end.
Corruption runs very, very deep. I am also certain the Epstein network is not only much bigger than known, but has different actors and beneficiaries. To this day the US court system can not explain why only Maxwell is in prison. That makes logically - and logistically - no sense at all.
I mean this specific example seems like a far cry from how horrible the Orban regime was. It’s basically ultra-conservative posturing. And Magyar being super conservative was known ahead of the vote. Granted I am no expert in Hungarian politics, but from this single example it seems a bit intense to call him Orban 2.0.
And I also don’t think you can compare Magyar pre- and post election to the new Serbian elected government at all. But I do agree actually producing enough noticeable change until the next election will be hard for both. It just takes time to unfuck countries.
Can you elaborate? I mean to my limited outsider understanding, Magyar's entire platform "exactly as right wing as Orban, but with less corruption and with proper democratic civil liberties". Does signing some symbolic agreement about "boo antifa" really break with that promise?
“All our problems will be fixed when this other group get voted in”
Not necessarily, but do you think voting in the guy who held power for 13 years is going to help?
He clearly redirected the railway station maintenance budget to his friends instead, because he assumed the public were suckers who'd vote him back in no matter how badly he fucked up. Then the station canopy collapsed and killed people. Entirely avoidable.
When your leaders are nakedly corrupt, and through sheer luck you still have free and fair elections, you vote those fuckers out. Otherwise they'll fiddle while your country burns.
It looks like the public want someone else in charge, they'll give them a fair shake. Maybe the new lot will direct the treasure more appropriately.
In Serbia it was rather "when this conniving bunch of corrupt criminals gets oustes".
What is even your point?
Whilst it seems like a good idea to have academics run government, history has shown that countries run by engineers and scientists tend to end up with some great roads and dams, but failing economically and socially in almost every other way.
The politburo in the Soviet Union was stacked with engineers and it didn't work out that well.
A bit like the engineers themselves.
We need a country to elect an AI government and see how it goes, on the ballot this year are Claude Fable, Grok, Carbon and Astra
Well the recent experiments shows they can't make effective government for minecraft, let alone entire country
At a guess, 30% of the speeches given today in parliaments across the western world were already written/inspired by an LLM. This is somewhat inevitable.
The article https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/09/23/ai-written-spee... has some data on this (it uses Pangram for the classification).
Did anyone listen before anyway? I feel like it's mostly about rhetorics and headlines
I am far from an ai booster but at this point I think even chatgpt 3.5 would do a better job than the current establishment
US CIA and US State Department Behind Serbia's "Student List" Media N1 and Nova S (United Group) [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50300051
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5lwZU7Q5U0
with the move a likely an attempt to distance US involvement in the media network;This channel is literally full of pro-Russian propaganda by a random guy in Bangkok. Show us a substantial source, if there is one.
Or are you simply reproducing a regime’s narrative on here?
Those two channels with limited cable availability had 0 to do with the extremely horizontal and leaderless Student List, that openly stated will do fuck all on the foreign front apart from stopping manufacturing of Israel’s drones. Btw since you’re “doing your own research” see who supported and even better who installed the former ruling party.
On the one hand, I have no doubt that the US and everyone else able would push their agenda in uncertain times. On the other, imagining that it is all CIA/FSB and so on denies agency to thousands of people who have put in the effort to change thier country.
Conspiracy drivel.