Serbia’s Students Put Vučić’s Entire Government Up for Peer Review

PARODY — Belgrade, Serbia

With Serbia voting in a snap parliamentary election Sunday, the country’s student movement announced that Aleksandar Vučić’s government would no longer be permitted to describe its record as “stable” until it survived peer review.

The decision has transformed the election from a contest for Parliament into an academic reckoning for a man who has spent more than a decade mastering the subtler arts of political survival: controlling the temperature of a room, arriving through the correct door, and making every institution seem independently enthusiastic about whatever he just said.

“President Vučić has submitted a 14-year manuscript entitled Actually, Everything Was Fine Until Everyone Became Extremely Negative,” said a fictional spokesperson for the Students’ List, standing before a panel of exhausted undergraduates who had each been assigned one ministry, two state television appearances and an appendix of unexplained infrastructure costs. “Our preliminary finding is that the paper contains confidence, volume and several graphs that appear to have been printed directly from a campaign rally.”

The review process began badly for the ruling Serbian Progressive Party when a student in the back raised her hand and asked whether the administration could provide raw data for its claim that it had achieved “historic national unity.” Party officials responded by unveiling a montage of cheering crowds, ribbon cuttings and a drone shot of a highway at sunset.

The student wrote, “Citation needed,” on the screen.

Within hours, the government’s 14-year record had returned from review with 2,400 tracked changes. A red comment beside a section marked “Media Freedom” read: “Interesting use of the passive voice. Who, specifically, did the press become free from?” Another requested that the authors distinguish between public consultation and being told about a decision on television after it had already been made.

Vučić, who in this fictional universe has never faced an institution he could not address from a podium, reportedly attempted to resolve the matter by delivering a three-hour defense of his methodology. The student panel allowed him twelve minutes, then stopped him twice to ask whether his conclusion had been written before the evidence was collected.

That question produced the first visible crack in the government’s normally formidable confidence. A senior party strategist whispered that the students were “weaponizing procedure,” apparently unaware that procedure had been the government’s preferred sedative for years.

Then came the review’s unexpected second phase: the students announced they were not rejecting the paper. They were sending it out for revisions.

This alarmed officials far more than defeat would have. Losing an election is painful but legible; it produces speeches, blame, flags, eventually a new set of posters. Revisions are forever. Revisions require admitting a draft exists. Revisions imply that the author may have learned something, which is a dangerous precedent for any party whose public position is that it has been correct since roughly the invention of Serbia.

The revised manuscript arrived at party headquarters Monday morning with a cover sheet demanding “a clearer theory of accountability.” An aide reportedly asked whether accountability was a European Union requirement. Another proposed changing the font to make it look less mandatory.

State media, meanwhile, sought to restore order by booking a succession of commentators to explain that peer review was an elitist foreign custom designed to punish ordinary citizens for trusting a government that had repeatedly assured them it was doing research.

But the students had anticipated the counterattack. Their next comment, inserted beside a chapter titled “The People Have Spoken,” read: “Please specify which people, when, and whether they were permitted to finish their sentence.”

By evening, Vučić’s allies were demanding a recount of the comments, alleging that several had been submitted by people who had not yet graduated, owned bicycles, or looked suspiciously capable of reading an annual budget without becoming emotionally attached to it.

At press time, the panel had granted the government one final extension, provided it resubmitted its entire era in a format other than a victory speech.

Vučić accepted the terms, then asked if the peer reviewers could be investigated for failing to applaud during his oral defense.