Why a student protest movement is challenging 12 years of Vučić rule in Serbia
After two years of student protests, Serbians vote on Sunday in elections that could bring down the ruling party.
Why a student protest movement is challenging 12 years of Vučić rule in Serbia
Young Serbians have driven the movement, but none of the candidates are students
Rallies were held across Serbia on Thursday, the last day of campaigning before a snap election described as a referendum on the country’s future.
After two years of student protests, Serbians will vote for a new parliament on Sunday in an election that threatens populist leader Aleksandar Vučić’s 12 years in power.
The biggest challenge to Vučić’s grip on Serbian politics comes from a two-year-old student movement, though questions remain over whether the vote will be fair.
They have no clear leaders and little political experience, but the “Student List-Students Win” movement has drawn anti-government voters from across Serbia.
The Student List is putting forward candidates from all parts of Serbian society - and as he joined students marching towards Belgrade, lead candidate and cardiologist Ilija Srdanović said history was being rewritten: “The energy is unstoppable.”
It all started on 1 November 2024, when a concrete canopy collapsed outside Novi Sad train station, in Serbia’s second-largest city, killing 16 people.
The disaster was widely seen as a symbol of corruption and negligence in Serbia. Critics tied the station’s fatally flawed renovation to a president who had closely linked himself to the project.
The canopy over the front of the station in Novi Sad collapsed without warning on 1 November 2024
What began as weekly student protests demanding justice on university campuses and city streets quickly grew into a national movement, often organised locally, and drawing in many more parts of Serbian society, including farmers, actors and judges.
The Serbian Progressive party (SNS), founded by Vučić, was rattled and within weeks the prime minister resigned. Belgrade saw one of its largest protests ever in March 2025, and while the leaderless student movement grew stronger, it organised itself through student assemblies or plenums.
In the last election in 2023, Vučić’s SNS was challenged by a loose coalition of pro-EU parties that later broke apart. This time, he faces a much clearer threat from a student movement that has rejected mainstream opposition parties.
Vučić has been prime minister or president since 2014, and was deputy prime minister for two years before that
Vučić has served two terms as president and cannot run for a third, so he is now leading his party with the goal of returning to the post of prime minister, which he left in 2017
The right-wing populist leader has intensified unfounded claims that his opponents are not really students and professors, but “mighty great powers” trying to topple Serbia. He has also promised to end what he sees as the politicisation of schools and universities.
Vučić has taken a careful line with the West, continuing to support Serbia’s bid for European Union membership while refusing to impose sanctions on Russia over its full-scale war in Ukraine. Several government ministers attended the Belgrade funeral of war criminal Ratko Mladić, drawing EU anger over his “glorification”.
Helena Ivanov of the Henry Jackson Society, a foreign policy think tank, says the students have managed to mobilise the public in a way traditional opposition parties have not - and that this is Vučić’s biggest challenge since he came to power.
“He’s been running in all elections Serbia has had since the introduction of multi-party election system - so obviously defeating him isn’t going to be easy, but this time around President Vučić isn’t going to have an easy time either,” she told the BBC from Belgrade.
Serbia’s parliament has 250 seats and there is a single nationwide constituency under proportional representation.
Voting begins at 07:00 (06:00 GMT) and ends at 20:00 on Sunday.
There are 6.45 million registered voters, and anyone over 18 has the right to choose which party list of candidates to support.
Sunday’s election features 18 lists, but only seven are fielding the full 250 candidates. MPs are elected according to the level of support a list receives if it wins more than 3% of the vote.
Several opposition parties have withdrawn in favour of the Student List.
Despite the name, the candidates are teachers and university professors, actors and doctors, farmers and scientists rather than students.
They still have no leaders, but top candidate Ilija Srdanović is a cardiology professor in Novi Sad, while others include former basketball star Dejan Bodiroga, well-known actor Tihomir Stanić and former National Bank of Serbia governor Dejan Šoškić.
The student movement wants to: eradicate corruption by creating a police unit to arrest those responsible for it; purge officials in the internal affairs ministry of anyone who broke rules on cracking down on protesters, or anyone linked to organised crime; reform Serbia’s distorted media landscape and free the public broadcaster from political control; stop appointing party loyalists to run public enterprises
Vučić and the SNS deny corruption and any attempt to influence the media.
European observers are watching Sunday’s vote, but even before it takes place the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has described a “tense and divisive electoral climate” and a “referendum-like atmosphere”.
Serbia’s election commission says the elections are free and the ballot is secret. However, the independent watchdog CRTA has warned of a campaign marked by threats and physical violence
and opposition activists subjected to surveillance.
In a report before the vote, it said that instead of ensuring equal conditions for candidates, “a range of institutions, from ministries to local governments, became involved in electoral engineering”.
The watchdog said nearly three-quarters of TV coverage in Serbian media was devoted to government representatives, and alleged that ministries and local governments had become involved in “electoral engineering”.
Some 160 attacks on media and journalists have been recorded in Serbia this year, according to the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom.