Serbia’s Students Win Governing Majority After Two Years of Revolt
Serbia’s student-led movement has turned two years of marches, blockades and anti-corruption organizing into a governing majority, breaking Aleksandar Vučić’s 14-year grip on the country’s politics.
With nearly 99 percent of ballots counted from Sunday’s parliamentary election, the Students’ List held 52.7 percent of the vote and 139 seats in the 250-member National Assembly, Reuters reported Monday. Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party-led alliance stood at 39.2 percent and 97 seats.
The scale of the result matters as much as the victory. Students did not merely deny the governing bloc a majority. They won one outright, giving their handpicked candidates the arithmetic to form a government without depending on the old opposition parties they deliberately kept at arm’s length.
Vučić conceded late Sunday. “It is now clear that we have lost and the Students’ List has won,” he told supporters, according to the Associated Press. Crowds poured into Belgrade and other cities, dismantling barriers around a pro-government encampment and celebrating through the night.
A movement born from preventable deaths
The revolt began after a concrete canopy collapsed at the Novi Sad railway station in November 2024, killing 16 people. Students connected the disaster to corruption, opaque contracting and a political system that protected officials from accountability.
Their demands started with the publication of records and punishment for those responsible. The movement then widened into a national challenge to state capture. Students occupied universities, walked and cycled through rural towns, organized mass demonstrations and built alliances with teachers, farmers, workers and other citizens.
That patient organizing reached people beyond the metropolitan opposition. AP reported that students campaigned in rural districts that had long served as Vučić’s strongest base. High turnout transformed years of protest into an electoral mandate.
The movement rejected the usual search for a single savior. Instead, it selected 250 candidates from outside professional party machines: teachers, doctors, lawyers, academics, actors, farmers and musicians. That breadth helped it appear less like another opposition brand and more like a social coalition built against corruption.
Radomir Saičić, one of the student-backed candidates, called the result a “victory over fear.” He immediately added that victory carries responsibility. That warning now becomes the central test.
Winning power is only the first step
The Students’ List has promised institutional reform, stronger public services and a government capable of enforcing the law against well-connected interests. It now has to convert assemblies and protest discipline into budgets, legislation and administrative control.
No prime minister has been chosen. The movement includes people with different ideological views, and almost none has national governing experience. Serbia’s bureaucracy remains filled with officials appointed during the Progressive Party era, while pro-government media and powerful business networks will not disappear with one election.
Foreign policy will also resist easy slogans. Serbia depends on trade with the European Union while maintaining major economic and political relationships with China and Russia. The student movement does not recognize Kosovo’s independence and has proposed a referendum on eventual EU membership rather than automatic alignment with Brussels.
Those tensions make the victory more significant, not less. A decentralized movement has displaced an entrenched political machine through sustained organizing and a mass vote. But defeating Vučić at the ballot box is different from dismantling the system built around him.
Serbia’s students have won the authority to try. Their next struggle is to prove that a movement created in the streets can govern without reproducing the hierarchy, patronage and impunity it was formed to defeat.
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