Serbia's projected election winner brings an anti-Jadar farmer into parliament

A farmer inside the majority

Ipsos and CeSID projected the Student List at 52% and Aleksandar Vučić's list at 39.3%, from a partial sample, the Rio Times reported. That projects about 138 seats to 104 in the 250-seat parliament. The Republic Electoral Commission (RIK) has not published a final result.

Zlatko Kokanović, a farmer from Gornje Nedeljice in western Serbia, is on the ticket and has campaigned against the project for almost seven years. Five days before the vote he told the daily Danas that "there is no point in talking with such a company". His answer to Rio Tinto is a law permanently banning lithium exploration and mining in Serbia.

Jadar remains on the European Commission's list of strategic raw materials projects. A permanent ban would remove a project Brussels counts on as it tries to cut dependence on China for critical raw materials, pagenews reported. Neither the incoming majority nor Rio Tinto has said whether such a bill will be tabled.

Socialist Alternative put the Student List at nearly 53%, with turnout near 70%, and said at least 150,000 people gathered in Belgrade three days before the election, in a country of about 6.6 million. The movement behind the ticket began with the collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad on 1 November 2024, which killed 16 people. Students shut their universities and took decisions in open assemblies called plenums. Vučić resigned as president 12 days after RIK certified the list on 15 September, seven months before his second term ended, to run for prime minister. Speaker Ana Brnabić has been acting president since 28 September.

Why Brussels is watching Jadar

Rio Tinto found jadarite, a lithium-bearing mineral, near Loznica in 2004. The company's projections put the deposit at about 58,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate a year, enough for around 1.1 million electric-vehicle batteries.

In July 2024 the EU and Serbia signed a raw materials partnership, which German chancellor Olaf Scholz called "an important European project and contribution to Europe's sovereignty". Tens of thousands marched against the mine in Belgrade that August. Vučić had declared lithium "the great untapped wealth of Serbia" in June 2020, and a month later Rio Tinto approved $200 million for further project development. The company had been exploring mining possibilities in Serbia for about two decades.

Two cancellations and a court ruling

Protests and road blockades in late 2021 forced the government to scrap the project in January 2022. Prime Minister Ana Brnabić said then: "We have fulfilled all the requests of the environmental protests and put an end to Rio Tinto in the Republic of Serbia". Rio Tinto had pledged to invest $2.4 billion in the project. The Kreni-Promeni petition against it gathered 290,000 signatures, and the group was central to the 2022 fight.

In July 2024 the Constitutional Court ruled the cancellation unlawful, and the government revived the project. Rio Tinto's own reports now describe the mine as paused, to be revived "when the time comes".

The trust problem Rio Tinto paid to address

Rio Tinto confirmed hiring ESBR Consulting, run by Asaf Eisin, after a tender for a brand campaign responding to what it called a "disinformation campaign against the project in Serbia". The company's due diligence identified Eisin's connection to Vučić.

An Ipsos Strategic Marketing survey completed in April 2021 found growing scepticism in the local area compared with three years earlier. Its authors recommended "more active and frequent involvement" of mining and energy minister Zorana Mihajlović, environment minister Irena Vujović and Vučić, whose appearance in the "hot zone" could reduce mistrust. Rio Tinto said all suppliers are "subject to clearly defined rules and procedures"; Eisin declined to comment. The due diligence also cited Romanian media reports linking Eisin to Sebastian Ghita, a former Romanian MP; Serbia granted Ghita asylum in 2018. Nataša, a community member from Gornje Nedeljice, told Hotpress: "Nothing grows where they drilled".

What happens next

Every seat and vote figure is a projection or a party estimate. RIK certified the list on 15 September with 69,099 valid signatures. The Student List has 250 names and no single leader; Ilija Srdanović, a cardiologist, stands at the top. Socialist Alternative wrote that Srdanović is expected to become prime minister, while the Rio Times reported that who would become prime minister is still unclear. The movement's plenums keep a veto and struck 38 names from the ticket in September. The Student Plan, an 11-point programme, was presented on 15 September.