By Dušan Spasojević
The Serbian student movement ousted the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) after 14 years in office. The SNS ruled with a clear majority and on almost every single level of government – from the president, Aleksandar Vučić, to local city councils. Still, it has lost the elections to a wide movement without clear leaders or clear ideological positions. How is that even possible?
Firstly, it was not an overnight change. The student movement started to grow after the collapse of the canopy at Novi Sad railway station that killed 16 people in November of 2024. Students initiated university blockades through participatory democracy methods that enabled every student to be heard and to vote on all decisions of the movement, and a wave of disobedience and participation spread throughout society. The movement marched through Serbia in the winter of 2025 and organized the largest rallies in Serbian history, peaking at the March 15 gathering in Belgrade with more than 350,000 people. However, there were no results.
When the regime resisted the movement at its peak, it seemed that it had reached its limits without achieving any results. It has happened to several previous protest waves in recent history as the regime mastered the attrition strategy. However, the students called for a snap election in May 2025. They announced that they would run as an independent list, seeking to preserve support from the streets and transform it into institutional politics.
For some, it meant risking a repetition of the mistakes of previous protest waves and challenging the regime in its strongest arena.
The government rejected the initial request and postponed the elections for almost a year and a half, believing that the delay would give them a better chance to stay in power. While waiting, students prepared for the elections, selecting 250 candidates through lengthy procedures involving participatory mechanisms and elements of direct democracy. They engaged hundreds of experts on drafting the electoral manifesto and the future government’s program and recruited and trained thousands of members of electoral commissions to prevent electoral fraud. Finally, they invited citizens to organize zbors (local community gatherings) and act as local branches of the student movement. In a nutshell,
they created a party without calling it a party.
Regardless of these preparations, there was public doubt about whether the students could sustain success and pressure on the regime. They mastered the movement stage, but the electoral process was a completely different challenge. However, they beat the odds once again.
The students’ list ran the campaign under their own rules. They avoided the pitfalls and emphasized the strengths. The door-to-door campaign was initiated long before the elections were announced, using greater motivation and human resources to canvass throughout Serbia. When the campaign started, candidates joined students and marched, cycled, and talked wherever they could, preserving the image of the movement as direct and impersonal, yet still with quality candidates. Vučić invited leaders of the Student List (SL) for one-to-one debates (for the first time since coming to power), hoping to expose the lack of experience and skills among students’ candidates, but they refused. It was a bold move as it could have been seen as a lack of courage. Students relied on the critical media sphere, based on cable TV stations N1 and NovaS, which were supportive of them. The usage of social media was the strength of the movement from the beginning.
The campaign was not running smoothly. There were many differences within the movement, but they were kept out of public view. The transformation of authority from plenums to more efficient working groups caused some friction. The initial front-runner on the list had been replaced just a few days before the campaign began. Reaching an agreement on the electoral program took too long, and the final manifesto was published just a few hours before the election silence began. Some candidates appeared inexperienced and couldn’t speak within the agreed message box, sometimes causing controversy. Still, the campaign was a huge success, and voters overlooked the mistakes, leading to a landslide victory of 53%, which was large enough to prevent the regime from even trying to challenge the results or refuse to accept them.
After the great victory and several days of partying, new challenges lie ahead for Students List: transformation of power, restoration of basic democracy, and fulfilment of electoral promises, ranging from initial students’ requests (transparency and accountability related to the railway station tragedy) to establishment of institutions capable of dealing with the highest level of corruption, and restoring the rule of law. Of course, different constituencies also have high hopes on specific policy issues.
This is a whole new level, or a new scenario, to use a gaming term. This new scenario requires different skills and approaches, poses completely new challenges, and requires a different type of organization to complete the tasks.
First, the new government will have to deal with high hopes and expectations. The memory of the transitional problems after the fall of Milosevic remains vivid in Serbian minds. The public wants arrests and prosecutions, and these processes take time. The public wants to see those who served Vučić out of office, the media, universities, or, at the end of the day, public life. But those people have their rights, and they will use them regardless of how much they ignored and neglected others’ rights.
Besides the thirst for justice, Serbia will face significant issues stemming from the SNS rule: growing public debt, inflated megalomaniac projects such as the EXPO2027 exhibition and Belgrade Waterfront development project, and international commitments, with the most critical dealing with relations between Serbia and Kosovo.
Second, to deal with those issues, the movement has to become even more effective. The campaign phase meant the transfer of power from plenums to working groups, but the ruling phase would require that MPs or ministries gain real authority, freed from students’ control. This will be a challenge, as students have always kept control of the process, keeping the candidates and representatives within the agreed frameworks. The question of trust and fear that someone will steal students’ victory and gain benefits is among the key concerns within the movement. The electoral manifesto will enable the initial transition of power and trust from the movement to elected officials, but this might represent a real challenge in the mid-term.
Third, similarly, the ideological heterogeneity was turned into an asset during the previous stages of the movement as it enabled students to attract voters with catch-all tactics.
However, once in office, it is probably going to be harder to avoid some salient and divisive issues, especially because they can become more impactful depending on forces students cannot control.
The position of the EU on sanctions against Russia or topics related to regional disputes derived from dissolution of Yugoslavia pose challenges during the campaign, but they have to be approached very differently when discussed with EU representatives or in formal regional diplomatic forums.
Of course, there will be more challenges. Conventional political science and comparative examples would not give good chances to a future Serbian government to fulfill all of its promises. But Serbian voters rolled the dice and now hope for another success story against the odds. Let’s keep fingers crossed.
Dušan Spasojević is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade. His research interests include political parties, theories of social cleavages, civil society, populism, and post-communist transition.
Photo: ImStevan / CC BY-SA 4.0
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
