Serbia's student movement just elected a parliament where more than half the members hold a Ph.D. or M.D.

Knowing nothing about it this particular movement, the main danger I foresee is essentially hubris. That the PHDs will be overly confident in political decisions they make in new domains completely foreign to them, primarily due to their expertise in their own domains and that this will lead to disastrous policy decisions.

I see this often in many areas. Perhaps they'll be lucky and have a few behavioral psychologists among them to maintain intellectual humility.

I hope it works out for them. In my home country students overthrow the government and put a Nobel Prize winning economist in charge. Now GDP growth has collapsed and the security situation has become precarious.

I’m also reminded of Ashraf Ghani, the last President of Afghanistan, who was a professor and wrote a book “Fixing Failed States.” He ended up fleeing the country like a coward as it collapsed.

It’s notable that students played a major role in the 1979 Iranian revolution that ended up putting the Ayatollah in power. In fact to my knowledge, student-led revolutions have never produced a long term positive outcome. Any examples?

I feel most comments in this thread do not really understand what Vućiċ regime was.

Google Aleksandar Vućiċ Voja Nevolja meat grinder…

Vučiċ is successor of people that assassinated Zoran Ðinďić, a Serbian prime minister. Basically drugs and arms dealers from either mafia, secret service or special forces.

Even if this government ends up being corrupt the level of moral lows they would need to hit to reach previous regime is staggering.

So people justifiably think it can’t get worse… but that only the time will tell…

I am from Serbia, a student, and supported the movement from the start, and I hope it works, but there are a few risks

I think it's inevitable that the "leaders" will just appear from the student list, then the student list gets destroyed, those leaders form their own parties and we'll elect another radical idiot who's not from the student list

Even now a few days after winning the election, you already have people from the SL who have a "brand", and who get idolized

Also people in our country are accustomed to corruption in our country, and if the new government starts beating down the corruption, the people will start hating the new government

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 as vulnerable to these things.

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.

The shiny-brained parliament started with a decision to revoke the license from Alta bank. This one was the most popular bank of Russian relocants, because only this one allowed to transfer money from the Russian banks.

As a result - a lot of people now have their accounts blocked, and the promise was left, to start the insurance payouts, so I believe it was said "your money are completely safe".

Closing of the bank was a low-hanging fruit decision, which everybody liked, because Alta bank was under dictator Vucic's protection, presumably the corruption schemes took place, and so on.

In fact, thousands of Russian relocants have been left with blocked accounts and with no money. On Monday, hundreds of those people will siege the 1 or 2 Serbian bank branches in attempt to open the account there. Other banks there are European - Raif, OTP, etc, so they're not allowed for Russians.

Interesting, that the brainiest parliament in the world started with a very populist decision, so it's the degradation from the very beginning. These brilliant minds better would've been stayed in science, rather than getting into politics.

Quite a lot of cynicism and contempt expressed in this thread, and not entirely unjustified: historically, "governments of intellectuals" led to some of the worst regimes.

However, I want to look at this experiment more optimistically, see if this assembly can defeat the stereotype. I'll be observing its activity with interest!

which brings to mind the old William F. Buckley Jr., who famously remarked that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University.

But the idea of randomly selecting leaders as a leveling distribution is as old as Athens. We still practice it in Jury selection in much of the world.

So this experiment in Belgrade might be worth watching and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they outperform previous and regional governments.