Dismissal calls in Pioneers Park

Days after the Student List's election victory, candidates of the direct democracy movement gathered in Pioneers Park in Belgrade, opposite the national assembly, with a concrete list of demands. Top of it: the removal of senior law enforcement officials.

The names they put forward for dismissal included:

• •the chief of the criminal police
• •the chief of the paramilitary gendarmerie
• •the chief of an anti-terrorism unit

Candidate Svetlana Stanarević drew applause when she accused senior officials of violating the law and demanded the resignation of the director of Serbia's internal intelligence agency. Her charge was that the agency had been run as "a party security service, not a state security service".

Justice for Novi Sad

The movement also pressed for the reopening or expediting of court cases connected to the Novi Sad railway station canopy collapse, which killed 16 people and sparked the student protest movement. Two years on from the disaster at the renovated station in Serbia's second city, there have yet to be any convictions - and Sunday will mark the second anniversary of the collapse.

Inside the institutions

For candidates, the change is as much about the people inside public bodies as those at the top. Iva Marković, a political ecologist who founded the Right to Water initiative, said honest workers in the institutions are no longer under political pressure. "We see this as a time where everyone who was honestly and credibly working within [public] institutions can do their jobs", she said.

Marković also pointed to the discipline that held the movement together, saying preventing "individualism" from undermining its core goals was key to its success. "When you dream together with some people, it's very hard to forget this dream, even if you are in parliament", she said.

The Student List is not a traditional party. It has no hierarchy or leader, and students have no direct control over the MPs they elected once those MPs are sworn in.

A warning from 2000

Borko Stefanović, a former punk rock bassist who was part of the movement that opposed Slobodan Milošević, set out his reform priorities: dismissing corrupt officials, getting the right people into the right places, bringing swift legal justice, liberating institutions and the media, and letting prosecutors arrest criminals.

He also carried a caution from that earlier experience. "We won on the 5th of October [2000] over Milošević, but we never had the 6th of October", he said - a reference to how the post-2000 democratic coalition wasted its early promise. His praise for the new generation came with the same caveat. "These wonderful, wonderful people from the Student List and the student movement, they know exactly what needs to be done", he said, adding a blunt instruction: "Don't blow it."

The dismissal demands and the calls to reopen the Novi Sad cases now pass to a movement whose MPs take office with no leader and no hierarchy, with the forming of a government left to the successful candidates themselves.