Snap parliamentary elections in Serbia are scheduled for 25 October, after parliament was dissolved and Aleksandar Vučić cut short his second presidential term to run for prime minister. After almost two years of protests, civil disobedience and resistance led by the student movement, during which two prime ministers resigned (the first without elections and without a change of ruling party), the election might be the first step out of a deep social and political crisis. 

Can the students achieve what successive protest movements and opposition coalitions could not: displace the Serbian Progressive Party(Srpska napredna stranka; SNS)?

A History of Unsuccessful Opposition

The student movement emerged under the entrenched authoritarian rule of the SNS and its coalition partners, chiefly the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), formerly led by Slobodan Milošević. They dominated institutions from the national to the local level, with no rival approaching their electoral support.

Repression and fear sustained this dominance, alongside the perpetuation of economic hardship that many accepted as normal. One-off payments and access to mostly low-paid jobs secured support from the lower social strate despitethe SNS’s enmeshment in domestic and international oligarchic networks.

EU leaders treat Vučić as a business partner and guarantor of stability, without a reliable alternative. The EU–Serbia raw-materials partnership illustrates these economic stakes, which helps explain the EU’s limited backing for the students.

If the students topple Vučić, they will have done so through their own efforts, contrary to his claims of a foreign-financed “color revolution”.

With the opposition fragmented and distrusted even by opposition voters, the strongest challenges to SNS rule since 2012 have come from outside political institutions: municipalist mobilizations, anti-authoritarian protests and environmental resistance to lithium mining in western Serbia.

The government sought to channel these struggles into institutions it controlled. Lowering the electoral threshold from 5 to 3 percent in February 2020 encouraged further fragmentation since parties running independently could now hope to gain seats in parliament. The move also drew resistance away from the streets. Over the years, opposition parties tried out broad coalitions, narrower ideological alliances, and election boycotts without seriously threatening the government’s dominance.

SNS rule was not threatened by a series of scandals in the 2010s: a military helicopter crash that killed seven, including a sick baby being evacuated; illegal demolitions in Belgrade’s Savamala district to make way for the real estate project Belgrade Waterfront; officials’ disputed qualifications, preferential arms deals, and a cannabis operation allegedly protected by security personnel. 

More seriously, Oliver Ivanović, a Kosovo Serb politician who opposed the Belgrade-backed Serbian List, was assassinated in 2018 after a smear campaign.

In 2023,then, the Serbian List’s deputy leader, Milan Radoičić, admitted organizing the Banjska armed operation, in which a Kosovo police officer and three Serbian gunmen died. This October, he was seen at an SNS rally in Kragujevac alongside Vučić’s elder son. Despite an Interpol Red Notice, he remains in Serbia.

Such cases provoked outrage but did not produce a force capable of confronting the government.

Two mass shootings in May 2023 also sparked protest. The killings, on consecutive days, claimed 19 lives: ten at Vladislav Ribnikar Elementary School in Belgrade and nine in Malo Orašje and Dubona.

Mourners founded Serbia Against Violence, a movement involving citizens and established opposition parties, which subsequently formed an electoral coalition. It won around 24 percent in that year’s parliamentary elections, against nearly 47 percent for the SNS and 6.5 percent for the SPS.

Once again, mass protest had been channeled into elections the ruling parties comfortably won.

Railways and Revolt

The collapse of the railway station canopy in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, on 1 November 2024, shocked the public once again. The mobilizations that followed belonged to the same family of protests, although they unfolded in distinct cycles. . Initially, its appeal was moral rather than explicitly political. Mourners blocked streets and stood in silence to commemorate the victims of the train station collapse. As a repertoire of collective action, silence served as an “absolute unifier” across ideological and generational divides. 

The station was ceremonially reopened twice during its reconstruction: on March 19, 2022, alongside the launch of the Belgrade–Novi Sad high-speed railway, and again on July 5, 2024, after further renovation work. The canopy collapsed less than four months after the second reopening. The tragedy became associated with corruption and institutional irresponsibility.. Vučić falsely claimed that the canopy alone had not been renovated, but evidence of work on it soon raised questions about construction quality and professional oversight.

Nearly two years later, there seems little prospect of holding those most responsible to account.An indictment has been brought against 13 people, including former construction minister Goran Vesić, railway officials, engineers, and contractors. A separate indictment against three people responsible for approving the station’s use has twice been returned for reconsideration. An organized-crime investigation into suspected financial abuses also involves Vesić and his predecessor as construction minister, Tomislav Momirović, over alleged budget losses of $115 million. 

 This time, however, the demand for accountability did not fall back into the familiar pattern of mobilization under established opposition leadership. Instead, it produced one of the most politically potent student movements of the 21st century.

A Student List vs Vučić’s SNS Machine

The revolt began when students at Belgrade’s Faculty of Dramatic Arts were attacked during a silent tribute to the Novi Sad victims. The blockade they launched in response soon spread across the university system. Within months, the movement was mobilizing hundreds of thousands, with direct-democratic plenums becoming the basic decision-making bodies in occupied faculties. Professors, teachers, farmers, lawyers, cultural workers, and citizens from towns and villages joined the struggle.

The students’ initial demands were basic: publication of all documentation concerning the station’s reconstruction; identification and prosecution of those who attacked students and professors, and their removal from public office where applicable; dismissal of charges against students and citizens detained at protests; and a 20 percent increase in funding for public higher education institutions.

Yet the movement’s significance soon went beyond these demands. Local citizens’ assemblies, known as zborovi, extended participatory organization beyond universities.

Particularly significant was the participation of students from Novi Pazar, a predominantly Bosniak and Muslim city. Their involvement challenged decades of ethno-nationalist politics. Without them, the movement would not have been the same.

Violence by Vučić’s “loyalists”, beatings and cars driving into protesters at peaceful rallies, and the use of a sonic device at the massive March 15, 2025 protest, which I witnessed firsthand, intensified tensions and drew more people into demonstrations and neighborhood organization. Seeing their demands unfulfilled, the student concluded that elections were necessary.

In May 2025, they founded the Student List as an electoral vehicle without delegating collective decision-making to party leaders or any other individual authority.

The movement’s candidate selection reflected this ethos. The students formulated a list of criteria candidates had to fulfill, which included the stipulation that candidates could never have been a member of the SNS. The candidates then presented themselves to the student plenums where their records were scrutinized. The students also developed mechanisms to hold their future representatives accountable. 

In September, the students presented the 250 candidates running for the list: Prominent professors and public figures like actors or musicians appeared alongside workers, activists, teachers, doctors, and others previously unknown to the public. Centrists, left-wing candidates, and conservatives running on the ticket were united by their opposition to the ruling elite.

Polls and Potential Coalitions

Long before the snap election was called on September 9, the students had built much of their campaign infrastructure. Voters were drawn into conversation through door-to-door visits while “a student in every village”mobilized voters across the country.  The List’s online campaign communicated hope, humor and enthusiasm and managed to circumvent the media system and toxic public sphere cultivated by the SNS. Acting students produced videos mocking Vučić and contrasting his Serbia with the country they want to build. 

On the other side of the political divide, everything revolves around the former president and his staged tours through Potemkin villages of prosperity and progress. Compared to the student’s collective youthful creativity, Vučić’s campaign looks sluggish and generic. Rambling speeches recycle familiar tropes: “enemies of Serbia,” “foreign mercenaries” and similar scapegoats. Pro-government media are harsher even, calling students “Ustaše,” invoking the Croatian fascist movement of the Second World War.

Beyond the rhetoric, Amnesty International has documented spyware deployed against journalists and activists. In addition, the lack of polling stations and inconvenient voting hours could prevent thousands of diaspora voters from voting.

That the SNS resorts to these tactics is a reflection of how serious the electoral challenge facing the SNS is. Some polls see the students in the lead; others suggest a close race, while some put Vučić’s list ahead. A September survey put the students at 44.4 percent and the governing list at 41.7 percent. The range of findings makes confident predictions impossible. It is both possible that SNS survives or that it will be removed, though Serbia appears closer to the latter than ever before under SNS rule.

Forming a government could depend on minority lists and three other actors. The SPS, Vučić’s longstanding partner, has changed sides before, serving in government under President Boris Tadić before joining the SNS after his defeat in 2012. Its support is near the threshold in some surveys. It.

Two opposition coalitions could also tip the balance: a pro-European alliance involving former Belgrade mayor Dragan Đilas’s party, a divisive figure among opposition voters, and a conservative alliance led by New DSS, the successor to the party once headed by Vojislav Koštunica, who defeated Milošević in 2000. Surveys place them on different sides of the 3 percent threshold. Whether they enter parliament could be decisive for a majority.

The harder question to answer is whether the SNS would relinquish power if defeated or continue politics “by other means.” An inconclusive result or a contested vote could prolong the crisis. The movement’s ability to defend the result would then matter as much as its electoral campaign.

A New Opening for Serbia’s Left?

By 2024, nationalism and neoliberalism, the two sides of Serbia’s post-socialist transition, had acquired an almost absolute hold over the country. Transition no longer meant simply moving from socialism to capitalism or from one-party rule to political pluralism. The SNS’s arrival in 2012 had marked the beginning of the end of a liberal transition with democratic elements and the gradual consolidation of authoritarian neoliberal governance.

As the divide between authoritarianism and democracy dominated political life, radical-democratic and revolutionary politics lost ground. Most “pro-democratic” opposition voices adopted liberal-democratic positions. Right-wing opposition actors largely left nationalism unquestioned, while liberals rarely challenged neoliberalism..

A new generation meanwhile grew up without memories of socialism or the early transition. Its educational and moral horizons were shaped by a post-socialist paradigm in which clerical ethno-nationalism fused with corrupt, predatory neoliberalism– to make the social, economic and political climate unbearable. The generation that is now leading the revolt grew up in these conditions.

 Nonetheless, this is not a left-wing movement, even if it includesleft-wing activists and unmistakable elements of left-wing politics. Plenums inspired zborovi, which organized smaller protests and civil disobedience when most needed. Novi Pazar’s participation bridged ethnic divisions, even if conservative elements occasionally reproduced nationalist folklore.

The list’s 11-point program combines anti-corruption measures and independent institutions with support for domestic enterprise, a 12-month limit on fixed-term employment, affordable housing, and accessible healthcare. Whether predominant or not, these left-wing elements provide a substantial foundation for future left-wing organization.

But these will not automatically become a political force after Vučić’s departure. The immediate task will be to preserve plenums and zborovi as autonomous spaces. Their democratic practices need stronger connections to workplaces, unions and struggles over wages, insecure employment, and public services. The solidarity awakened by collectively resisting authoritarian rule can then be developed into social and economic demands that address the economic conditions on which SNS rule rested.

Realizing this potential requires the fall of the authoritarian regime. If the SNS remains in power after 25 Octoberdisappointment will be profound, and the regime will retaliate against their political opponents, with universities and students first in its sights. The election could open new possibilities for the Serbian left, but realizing them will require turning the movement’s democratic experiment into lasting organization and a struggle over the society that follows.

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