DOMINANT ANGLE
Beijing views the end of the Vučić era as a shift in domestic policy: Chinese media detail figures, seats and the anti-corruption origins of the student movement.
Dominant angle identified — does not reflect unanimity of this country’s media
KEY POINTS
- 01
Vučić: "It is clear that we have lost these elections"; the Student List would have 135 to 140 seats out of 250, his camp around 105 (CGTN).
- 02
Ipsos and CeSID projections: 52% for the Student List against 39.3% for Vučić's coalition (CGTN).
- 03
The collapse of the Novi Sad train station canopy in 2024 killed 16 people and triggered nearly two years of protests (SCMP).
ANALYSIS
Beijing, October 26, 2026. The Chinese press accessible in this corpus, led by CGTN, is treating Aleksandar Vučić's defeat as a shift in domestic policy: the end of fourteen years of domination by the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), confirmed the day after Sunday's anticipated legislative election on October 25.
CGTN, updated on Monday, October 26, presents the former Serbian president as having acknowledged his defeat before the official results. The first projections from the Ipsos and CeSID institutes give the "Student List – Students Win" 52% of the vote, against 39.3% for the "Aleksandar Vučić – United Serbia" coalition. From his campaign headquarters in Belgrade, Vučić stated: "It is clear that we have lost these elections." He estimated the opposing majority at 135-140 seats out of 250, compared to around 105 for his camp, or around 2.2 million votes against 1.72 million. The channel also mentions the celebrations at the Student List's headquarters and quotes one of its prominent candidates, Radomir Saičić, a professor at the University of Belgrade and a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
The South China Morning Post, published on the day of the vote, had set the stage beforehand: the election was announced as the most disputed in over fourteen years, the culmination of nearly two years of student-led protests. The recalled starting point is the collapse, in 2024, of the canopy at Novi Sad's train station, which killed 16 people, a drama "largely attributed to corruption." The Hong Kong daily describes it as the origin of some of the largest protests in Serbia since the fall of the previous government.
The narrative is thus primarily descriptive and arithmetic: projection figures, seat distribution, mention of a movement born out of anti-corruption protests. Both media outlets focus on the ongoing shift in power and the new force's absolute majority, without developing, in the available passages, the consequences for Belgrade's foreign policy or Vučić's attribution of his defeat to independent media and foreign interference. The formation of the future government remains, at this stage, the open question that these texts hint at, since the former head of state was seeking the post of Prime Minister.
