“This is not an ordinary election victory; this is an avalanche that has wiped out an authoritarian regime and entire political scene.”
Nebojša Vladisavljević, University of Belgrade, BBC News, October 26, 2026
When the flagging intelligentsia and jaded reformists retire to their offices of despair and forget that better days can come, let us give time to praise those of youth and youthful persuasion who, with faith and boldness, remain steadfast and stoic, committed and convinced. For them, the world is there to be changed, not gawped at or contemplated in regret and resignation. In India, the Cockroach Janata Party has shown that ministers will fall on their swords when an enraged, focused youth movement applies pressure. In France, amid grunts and complaints about social media corruption, external influences, and opportunistic troublemakers, students are leveling charges against a culture of neglect, staff shortages, and moldering facilities.
The fashioned jewel in the crown of protest has turned out to be, much to the shaken surprise of skeptics and pundits, Serbia. As with other states whose machinery has worn out, whose arteries have hardened with authoritarian practices, clientelism and a lack of accountability, talk of change tended to stall at the ballot box. At the end of the count, the figure of Aleksandar Vučić always seemed to loom, petrified into the bureaucratic apparatus like an obstinate gargoyle refusing to leave his perch. However disliked, his fractious opponents repeatedly failed to unseat him. His victories echoed the elections of other countries doomed to patterns of circular history. As the economist Branko Milanović put it, borrowing from V. S. Naipaul, Serbia, like Argentina and Russia, would be the victim of such circularity: “the same events with different personalities re-occur permanently, and seemingly forever.”
Something, however, rumbled in 2024 with the November 1 collapse of a concrete canopy at the newly renovated Novi Sad train station, north of the country. It killed 16 people. Their deaths became cruel signifiers of entropy, decay, and graft, linked to the procurement process and poor building standards. The odious flies in the ointment proved to be Vučić and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Opposition parties failed to jump at the opportunity to make hay and target the regime. Students, initially from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, stepped in. They, along with supportive academics, caught the oppressive eye of government authorities. In retaliation, they organized a blockade of the faculty. A rash of university faculties and departments across the country followed suit. In time, an ecosystem of student participation flourished, marked by secret meetings run by councils with no hierarchies to speak of, no political insignias or flags. Rallies and blockades were organized. The decision to create neighborhood assemblies called zborovi signaled the organizers’ desire to move beyond university environs. The “Student List-Students Win” movement would, in time, prove irrepressible.
The government response, which took the form of funded groups keen to harass and pigeonhole the students as beneficiaries of foreign largesse, proved incessant. The pro-Vučić activists also set up their own encampment in Belgrade’s Pionirski Park, which protesters derided as ćaciland. (The term originated with the unlettered efforts of someone in Novi Sad who, in January 2025, tried to graffiti ‘students, go to school’ but misspelled the word đaci, or students.) The signs were clear, however: a movement, despite eschewing politics, had become a political threat to the Vučić government.
In the October 25 election, in which Vučić was hoping to win the post of prime minister, the Student List fielded candidates for all 250 parliamentary seats. They won an astonishing 52.65% of the vote, likely to translate into 135 to 140 seats. (The SNS have won 105.) Curiously enough, there were no students among them. If there was any notable head to speak of, it would have to be the cardiologist and Novi Sad academic Ilija Srdarnović. He had emollient words for the BBC: “We offer our citizens the core values of civilized society, which this previous regime has taken away from our citizens for the last time.”
After the jubilation and exercised tear ducts comes the reckoning. The elected candidates will have to learn, quickly, the ropes of a rusty ship of state. “The movement realized early on that it could be successful only if it was entirely apolitical,” wrote Milanović. He wonders, with interest and concern, whether an “amorphous mass that even lacks a visible leadership” can engage the traditional structures of government. “The decision not to move into the political and not to transform itself into a formal organization or a political party is both a blessing and a curse.” But for all that, the movement has ceased being amorphous, with its likely clutch of 140 representatives.
Vučić has, much to his opponents’ relief, grudgingly conceded defeat where a disruptive spell of stalling and bloodletting might have taken place. “I do not want unrest, I do not want killings, I do not want anything like that on the streets.” The question of how to confront corruption and the lack of accountability, without rancor and vengefulness, looms. The Student List has, at least to date, embraced the principles of democracy, pluralism and justice that may stave off such urges.