Aleksandar Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party, which has governed Serbia since 2012, is going into opposition. On Sunday a list of professors, doctors, farmers and athletes picked by student assemblies won an outright majority in the parliamentary election, according to preliminary results published on Monday.
With 8,135 of 8,392 polling stations counted, the Student List had 52.65 percent of the vote and Mr. Vucic’s United Serbia list had 39.2 percent, Balkan Insight reported from Republic Electoral Commission data. Turnout was 68.8 percent. A projection by the monitoring groups CeSID and Ipsos gives the students 140 of the 250 seats and the Progressives 103. The other seven go to Hungarian, Albanian and Bosniak minority lists, which don’t have to clear the 3 percent threshold that shut every other party out. A majority takes 126.
Mr. Vucic resigned the presidency on Sept. 27 to run for prime minister. He conceded at his party’s election-night event about an hour and a half after the polls closed, citing his party’s own sample of the count, The Associated Press reported.
It is clear that we have lost these elections, the Student List has won, they will have between 135 and 140 seats and we will have 105, no one else has entered parliament
He blamed Serbia’s independent media, unnamed European governments and what he called an “American deep state.” His own figures tell a different story. By his count, the Progressive vote barely changed from 2023. The change came from everyone else. Several hundred thousand more people voted, almost the whole anti-government vote went to a single list, and the rules behind that list, written in blockaded university faculties, left pro-government television with no politician on it to attack.
The students won a contest that domestic monitors and European observers had called unequal. In the closing weeks, the ruling majority got almost three quarters of political airtime on national television, according to the election monitor CRTA. The movement itself did not exist before November 2024.
Late Sunday in Belgrade, drivers in flag-draped cars honked through the streets. Riot police trucks pulled away from the pro-government camp outside parliament as crowds cheered, Agence France-Presse and The A.P. reported in a photo report on Al Jazeera. “I feel as though I am finally living in a free country,” said Mila Martic, a student. At the list’s headquarters, Radomir Saicic, a Belgrade University law professor and candidate, told supporters: “Serbia has won as we promised. Never again a tyrant in this country.”
Sixteen dead in Novi Sad
Just before noon on Nov. 1, 2024, the concrete canopy over the entrance to the railway station in Novi Sad collapsed and killed 16 people. The station had recently been renovated in a project carried out by Chinese companies, RFE/RL reported. Critics tied the faulty work to Mr. Vucic, who had championed the project, the BBC’s Paul Kirby wrote.
At first the protesters asked for little: publication of the reconstruction documents and accountability for the deaths, Euronews reported. On Nov. 22, students from Belgrade’s Faculty of Dramatic Arts were attacked during a silent vigil for the dead, according to a JAM News timeline. Then faculties started to blockade themselves. Decisions went to plenums, open assemblies where anyone present could speak and vote, and the movement had no leader who could be arrested or bought.
The government gave ground, and the protests kept growing. Prime Minister Milos Vucevic resigned in January 2025, saying he wanted “to defuse tensions.” On March 15, 2025, between 275,000 and 300,000 people rallied in Belgrade, according to the Archive of Public Gatherings, a nonprofit that counts crowds, as cited in Balkan Insight’s review of the year. The Interior Ministry’s estimate was 107,000. During a silence for the dead, an unexplained noise set off a small stampede. Government critics said a sonic weapon had been used. The authorities denied it.
For the rest of 2025 the movement swung between symbolic journeys and street confrontation. About 80 students cycled for 13 days from Novi Sad to Strasbourg to hand the Council of Europe a letter. In May, the plenums demanded early elections. By July protesters were blocking roads every day. In August police used tear gas outside Progressive Party offices and arrested several dozen people a day. On the anniversary of the collapse, about 110,000 people stood in Novi Sad for 16 minutes of silence.
A rulebook without leaders
Not every plenum wanted to run. In April 2025, Belgrade’s plenums voted 29 to 5 for demanding early elections but only 23 to 9 for fielding their own list. Those figures come from a study of the movement’s internal documents by Sadie Zarris, a Northeastern University student on placement in Belgrade with the nonviolence group CANVAS, published Oct. 21 on The Loop, the blog of the European Consortium for Political Research.
The rules the plenums adopted, known internally as the Directive, excluded anyone enrolled as a student in 2024-25, any former member of the 20 parties in the ruling coalition and any former official of a parliamentary opposition party. Serbia elects all 250 deputies from closed national lists, and places on this one were shared among university cities according to how many students each had. In August, plenums challenged 99 of the more than 300 people proposed. By September, 38 candidates and substitutes had been struck off.
The most prominent person removed was Vladan Djokic, rector of the University of Belgrade. He had backed the students from the start, and many expected him to lead the list. On Sept. 6, 43 of the 85 participating assemblies voted him off. The vetoes had no legal force. Ms. Zarris wrote that neither he nor anyone else refused to go.
The list was led by Dr. Ilija Srdanovic, a cardiologist and professor at the University of Novi Sad’s medical faculty. The actor Tihomir Stanic was eighth, the former basketball star Dejan Bodiroga 24th and Dejan Soskic, a former central bank governor, 27th, the BBC reported. There were no students on it. The students had judged that voters might not trust candidates with so little life experience.
The last famous student movement never solved this problem. Otpor, the leaderless group that helped bring down Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, became an ordinary party. It won 1.7 percent of the vote in 2003 and merged into the Democratic Party a year later, Ms. Zarris wrote.
The machine they ran against
By 2026 the Progressives controlled public finance, nearly all the national media, the police and the prosecutors, and they had run almost every local government since 2016, The Christian Science Monitor reported days before the vote. Over 11 days in August, Mr. Vucic gave 49 televised speeches. The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network collected about 180 accounts from state employees. They said they had been pushed to pledge their votes and attend rallies under threat of dismissal, pay cuts or transfers.
CRTA presented its preliminary campaign findings on Oct. 21. It recorded 116 incidents of physical violence or verbal threats, more than 650 possible misuses of public office, and a voter roll that had never been audited. In the week of Oct. 5 to 11, the ruling majority got 77 percent of the national television time given to political actors. Mr. Vucic alone got 29 percent, more than the whole opposition. Coverage of the Student List was negative more than 80 percent of the time. Ana Brnabic, the acting president and a senior Progressive official, accused CRTA of working for the students.
The broadcasts kept to one line. Mr. Vucic said foreign agents in Croatia and Montenegro were funding the students, a charge they rejected, Reuters reported. He also described the protests as a color revolution financed by foreign intelligence services. The Belgrade weekly Vreme traced the same script back to Milosevic. “Opponents of the government are presented as the extended arm of foreign interests,” Ana Martinoli, a media scholar at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, told The Monitor.
The bias was nothing new. Of the December 2023 election, observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe wrote that the president’s “decisive involvement,” together with “the ruling party’s systemic advantages, created unjust conditions for contestants,” in their final report. They also described that vote as “technically well-administered.”
How the arithmetic changed
In 2023 the Progressives won 46.75 percent of the vote, 1,783,701 ballots and 129 seats on a turnout of 58.8 percent, according to Council of Europe observers. The main opposition coalition, Serbia Against Violence, got 902,450 votes. On Sunday Mr. Vucic put his own list at about 1.72 million votes and the Student List at about 2.2 million, European Western Balkans reported. The count isn’t final. On his numbers, though, his party lost roughly 60,000 votes in three years, and the vote for its main challenger more than doubled.
Turnout explains most of the gap. At 1 p.m. on Sunday it was 41.1 percent, compared with 26.6 percent at the same hour in 2023, CRTA reported. In the diaspora, some Serbs had to vote in the middle of the night because polling hours followed Serbian time. The Independent called the final figure the highest since Yugoslavia broke up in 1992. Bojana Zoric, an analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies, said it was close to the level of September 2000, the election that brought Milosevic down.
The traditional opposition was mostly gone before the vote. Part of it stood aside for the Student List, as the opposition in Hungary had before Viktor Orban lost in April, The Monitor reported. The Socialists of Ivica Dacic, a Progressive ally, fell below 3 percent. So did European Serbia and the nationalist Authentic Right.
The students campaigned where the television didn’t reach. Student List activists said they visited 170,000 households in 20 days, European Western Balkans reported in early October. That figure could not be independently verified. Volunteers cycled and walked through rural Serbia, the Progressives’ heartland, and the movement trained people to watch polling stations. Independent monitors still reported dozens of irregularities on Sunday, including photographed ballots and attempted vote buying.
A year before the vote, Florian Bieber, a historian of Southeast Europe at the University of Graz, said the regime would face a choice between rigging the count and risking defeat. He told European Western Balkans that turnout was the defense.
The more people who go to vote across the country, the harder it is to manipulate the election results.
The polls missed it. An Ipsos survey published three days before the election had the Progressives ahead, 47 percent to 40. Other polls put the students in front, and each camp claimed the lead. By election night, three separate counts agreed: CRTA’s quick count had 51.47 percent to 40.42, the CeSID-Ipsos sample 52.9 to 38.8, and the official tally 52.65 to 39.2.
The objections
The Hacker News thread on the result drew more than 150 comments. One reader questioned whether Mr. Vucic had ever run a closed system.
do you think, if there was real oppression people could even vote democratically and change their government? ... (not downplaying how bad Vucic had been to Serbia, but the fact that people replaced him without violence and democratically means something still was in place)
The record supports part of this. The ballots were counted, the 2023 vote was administered competently by the observers’ account, and Mr. Vucic conceded within two hours. The same observers found the 2023 conditions unjust, though, and CRTA’s 2026 data describe a campaign in which one side held most of the airtime. Serbia ran elections that could be lost, but only by a margin too wide to argue over. Mr. Bieber had said turnout would produce that margin. A lead of about 13 points, confirmed by three counts within hours, left little room for dispute.
Another reader asked whether the Student List was any less pro-Russian than Mr. Vucic. A third reader explained why many Serbs look to Moscow.
Some (mainly older people) still harbor negative feelings towards EU and NATO countries for bombing them in 1999 and recognizing Kosovo as an independent state. So an alliance with Russia seems like a better option to them even though it’s an economic dead end.
The documents answer the first question, and the answer doesn’t fit the Western reading of the result. In September the movement came out against sanctions on Russia, and a memorandum it issued in May called Kosovo an “inalienable and integral part of Serbia,” Ms. Zoric wrote in a commentary on Monday. Its candidates also floated a referendum on European Union membership within six months of taking office, Al Jazeera reported. But 75 percent of the list’s supporters want closer ties with the bloc and 10 percent want closer ties with Russia, Ms. Zoric wrote. Mr. Vucic predicted the opposite of the platform: “By March or April, you will have sanctions imposed on the Russian Federation,” he said, according to RFE/RL.
On the same thread, another reader argued the reverse, that Brussels had preferred the incumbent.
I thought it was interesting how the EU was more cozy with Vucic. My guess would be that despite this new movement being closer in ideals with what the EU should stand for, they are nervous about the idea of people taking control into their own hands instead of delegating to established parties.
Part of that holds up. Mr. Bieber said in 2025 that “the EU has been too silent.” The bloc did hold back on accession, though. It has not opened a new negotiating cluster with Serbia since December 2021, according to Ms. Zoric. And in September, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, said Belgrade’s public funeral for the convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic contradicted “the values underpinning Serbia’s path towards the European Union.” Whether Brussels fears movements without parties is speculation, and the record can’t test it.
European leaders did congratulate the students within hours. Marta Kos, the European commissioner for enlargement, posted on X on election night.
Dear Serbia, you have made your voice heard!
After nearly two years of protests for democracy, the rule of law and the fight against corruption, Serbians turned out in historic numbers.
Congratulations to the Student List on your victory!
These are the very values at the heart…
What comes next
The electoral commission has not yet published final results. Once it does, the new National Assembly has 30 days to convene and then 90 days to elect a government, according to Al Jazeera. The Student List named no candidate for prime minister during the campaign. Dr. Srdanovic is seen as the most likely choice. “Tomorrow, we begin working to build a state governed by the rule of law,” he said on Sunday, according to RFE/RL. Mr. Soskic, also mentioned for the post, has proposed a lustration law and inquiries into where officials’ property came from.
Another election comes first. Ms. Brnabic must call a presidential vote, to be held by Dec. 27 by Al Jazeera’s count, three months after Mr. Vucic resigned. The plenums have already adopted a procedure for choosing a candidate, according to Ms. Zarris. She said the Directive will face its hardest test there.
The Directive was written so that no one would rise above the plenums. The presidency requires someone who does.
Mr. Vucic will lead a bloc of about 103 deputies and has said he will keep fighting from opposition. “You succeeded for a moment,” he said on election night.
Ms. Zoric argued that the state the students inherit will be a bigger problem for them than the party they beat.
The window for reform may be narrow, particularly given the likely resistance from within state institutions.
The criminal case behind the protests still hasn’t come to trial. The court rejected the first indictment of Goran Vesic, a former construction minister, and 12 others, and prosecutors filed an amended one in September 2025, Balkan Insight reported. That December, the Higher Court in Novi Sad dropped the charges against Mr. Vesic and five others for insufficient evidence. On June 15 the Court of Appeal restored them.
Lawyers for Mr. Vesic and two co-defendants then asked the Supreme Court to review that decision. The Higher Court has said it cannot schedule even a preparatory hearing until the Supreme Court rules, Vreme reported in September. Sixteen people died at the station on Nov. 1, 2024. No one has been tried for it.