The Long Council

Can a movement without clear leaders bring lasting change?

Policy brief · 27 October 2026 · Hannah Arendt, Elinor Ostrom, Albert O. Hirschman, Julius Nyerere, Niccolò Machiavelli

Verdict

The Novi Sad movement's horizontal structure won the election; it will not survive governing without naming who leads.

Arendt and Ostrom locate the movement's real power in the 2024 to 2025 occupations, where people acted together without obeying any hierarchy. Ostrom points to self-governed commons that outlasted their founding moment only by building explicit rules: who proposes, who is monitored, who is sanctioned. Hirschman separates the cost of walking away from a blockade from the cost of staying inside a parliamentary coalition through a lost vote. Nyerere draws on the 1967 Arusha Declaration: TANU's unnamed collective leadership hardened into a bureaucracy no voter could remove.

Machiavelli names the asymmetry Vučić's loss does not erase: his party lost the vote but kept the judiciary and security services, all commanded by people who can be named. A movement of 135 to 140 members that will not say who decides hands those entrenched interests a target without building one of its own.

Confidence summary: The council treats the 26 October result as settled fact and the durability question as genuinely open, resting on contested historical analogues rather than agreed prediction.

1. The core argument

The Student List won the vote in Novi Sad's squares before it won the vote at the ballot box, and the council's real argument is about whether those are the same kind of victory. Horizontal organising proved it could generate power, defeat an entrenched party, field 134 doctorates without a single named figurehead commanding headlines. But winning an election is a single concerted act; running a parliament is thousands of sequential, unglamorous acts: whom to trust with a committee chair, whose compromise gets blamed when a bill fails. The council's sharpest insight is that these two phases run on different fuel. Occupation needs only unity in the moment. Governing needs a mechanism for disagreement that does not dissolve the group, and historically, that mechanism has almost always required a name attached to a decision. The 44% women, 134 PhDs, and the leaderless brand that won the election may need to produce an internal hierarchy within months, or produce chaos instead.

2. How each member frames it

Hannah Arendt insists the 2024 Novi Sad occupations already answered the hardest question: power does not require hierarchy to exist, only concerted action. Her unstated concession is that this power is radically perishable. She does not claim it survives parliament automatically; she poses it as the test, refusing to predict the outcome, which marks the limit of her framework. Arendt built her theory on revolutionary councils that mostly failed to outlast their founding moment, a fact she does not hide from.

What Hannah Arendt would do

→Document which committees and factions re-form after the vote, to test if concerted power survives dispersal into parliament.

→Convene joint assemblies of the elected members modeled on the faculty occupations, not standard party caucus meetings.

Elinor Ostrom rejects the binary between leaderless and hierarchical, pointing to commons governance that stayed member-controlled for generations without a single boss. Her candid limit: her strongest cases are small, bounded communities, irrigation systems, alpine pastures, not national legislatures with 135 to 140 competing egos. She is betting that parliamentary rules can scale what worked in villages, a bet she admits is unproven at this size.

What Elinor Ostrom would do

→Draft explicit rules inside the Student List bloc: who proposes bills, who monitors outcomes, who is sanctioned for failure.

→Establish a process the members themselves control for changing the bloc's internal rules once in parliament.

Albert O. Hirschman supplies the mechanism Arendt's framework lacks: why unity curdles. His 1970 loyalty-voice-exit model was built for firms and parties, not protest movements, and he concedes the translation is imperfect. His sharper point against Ostrom: rules do not manufacture loyalty, they only channel it, and parliamentary loyalty under real policy failure is untested for this group entirely.

What Albert O. Hirschman would do

→Build internal mechanisms that reward staying through a lost vote, since parliamentary work offers no instant vindication.

→Warn the 135 to 140 members that exit back to protest is easy and must be made costly to prevent collapse.

→Distinguish publicly between blockade tactics and coalition tactics, since the two demand opposite tolerances for delay.

Julius Nyerere speaks from inside a cautionary tale he lived, not merely studied: Arusha's collective leadership became an unaccountable bureaucracy within a decade. His limit is that Tanzania in 1967 was a one-party state without competitive elections forcing correction, a structural difference Serbia's multiparty system does not share, which he does not fully resolve.

What Julius Nyerere would do

→Name publicly who controls the whip and chairs the committees before the bloc hardens into an unaccountable bureaucracy.

→Hold an internal vote so members, not informal consensus, choose who is in charge.

→Publish the decision-making structure so voters can identify and remove the real leader at the next election.

Niccolò Machiavelli redirects the entire debate away from internal structure toward external threat: the old order's loyalists still command the judiciary and security services, and they are not leaderless. His challenge is not whether the Student List governs well, but whether it survives long enough to try, a question none of the other four fully engage.

What Niccolò Machiavelli would do

→Identify and name a single figure who takes blame and strikes back against entrenched judiciary and security interests.

→Target the identifiable commanders of the old regime's loyalists rather than treating the opposition as diffuse.

→Reject leaderlessness as a governing posture now that the movement faces organized, named adversaries in the ministries.

3. Where the council agrees

The least trivial agreement is that leaderlessness and governance are not the same achievement, and success at one says nothing about success at the other; all five members hold this, from Arendt's framework down to Machiavelli's realism. They also agree the 2024 to 2025 occupations generated something real, not merely symbolic, a point Arendt and Ostrom state directly and Hirschman and Nyerere do not dispute. Third, every member treats institutional design as a choice still available to the movement, not a foregone outcome; none argues the Student List is doomed by its origin. Finally, all five accept that someone will end up making binding decisions inside parliament regardless of branding; the disagreement is only whether that person is named publicly or emerges informally, which is a question about transparency, not about whether hierarchy appears at all.

4. Where the council splits

The line runs between Arendt and Ostrom on one side, who believe explicit rules can preserve horizontal power inside formal institutions, and Hirschman, Nyerere, and Machiavelli on the other, who doubt any ruleset survives the specific stresses of governing: lost votes, entrenched opposition, the slow grind Hirschman calls loyalty. Ostrom's commons examples are real but small; Nyerere's Arusha failure is real but occurred without competitive elections to correct it. Neither analogue maps cleanly onto a 135-member parliamentary bloc in a multiparty democracy that just defeated an entrenched incumbent. The disagreement is not resolved because the Student List is a genuinely novel case: larger than a commons, more democratic than Arusha, facing an opponent more organised than either precedent's.

5. For a policymaker to decide on

The Student List's leadership must choose: formalise named, accountable roles (whip, committee chairs, a spokesperson for hard votes) before taking their seats, accepting the risk that naming leaders recreates the hierarchy the movement defined itself against; or preserve collective, rotating decision-making and accept Hirschman's and Nyerere's warning that informal hierarchy will form anyway, unseen and unaccountable to voters. The trade-off is between transparency that costs the movement its founding identity, and authenticity that costs voters the ability to know who actually decided.