One Year On: How Students Sustained Serbia’s Broadest Protest Movement

The article was originally published on the website of the transform! europe network.
Photo: Bojan Kovačević

Anti-regime protests have become a near-daily fact of life in Serbia since 2016, when masked men demolished buildings overnight in Belgrade’s Savamala district to clear ground for the “Belgrade Waterfront,” a flagship development project tightly linked to the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). That event symbolised the impunity and collusion between politics and business that now defines the system.

A Tragedy That Sparked a Protest Movement

The latest wave of protests began in November 2024, after the newly renovated Novi Sad railway station canopy collapsed. The project, inaugurated just months earlier by the government officials as a “proof of Serbia’s progress”, turned out to be yet another overpriced public works scheme where funds were siphoned to regime-aligned companies.

Systemic corruption in Serbia is hardly new. Over the past decade, a “new business elite” has risen through close ties with the state and privileged access to public contracts. In 2024 alone, companies owned by ten businessmen close to the government generated over €1 billion in revenue. One subcontractor involved in the Novi Sad station works, Starting, posted a 251% profit increase that same year. This time, though, corruption was measured in human lives.

The public’s reaction was immediate and resolute. At exactly 11:52 AM, the moment the canopy fell, people across Serbia began blocking streets in silence – one minute for each life lost. In small towns that hadn’t seen demonstrations in decades, citizens stood still together. The gesture became both mourning and defiance, an act of collective grief and civic indictment.

The Student-Led Uprising

Unlike previous protest cycles that regime allowed to dissipate, repression came swiftly. Lower-ranking ruling party operatives and hired thugs attacked silent vigils. In late November, students and professors near Belgrade’s Faculty of Dramatic Arts were assaulted, sparking a wave of university occupations that soon spread nationwide.

From their occupied campuses, students issued four simple, common-sense demands: publication of all documentation concerning the Novi Sad station reconstruction; identification and prosecution of those who attacked students and professors; dropping charges against detained protesters; and a 20% increase in public university funding. Except for partial movement on education financing, none have been met.

Organisation ran through plenums – open student assemblies operating on direct democracy, where any student could propose, debate, and vote. Students not only anchored the protests but also amplified them, staging some of the largest rallies in Serbia’s political history. Literary walking from town to town and village to village, they reached people directly, face to face – bypassing state-controlled media and its distorted portrayals. They also launched the initiative “A Student in Every Village,” refusing to remain confined to universities and instead bringing their message to remote communities that had long been politically abandoned.

Through persistence, empathy, and impressive organisation, students built trust across broad layers of society. That trust also reflected timing: they emerged as a credible force precisely when the regime had neutralised nearly every other challenger, especially the traditional opposition parties.

Over time, much of Serbia’s opposition fragmented into narrow personal cliques with little activist base. Rivalries, rather than ideology, drove divisions. Some prominent opposition figures even crossed over to the ruling bloc, deepening public cynicism. The decay of opposition political parties isn’t purely self-inflicted: near-total TV dominance by pro-government broadcasters made sustained opposition messaging almost impossible. Vučić’s direct addresses saturated the airwaves and opposition airtime remained scarce and often hostile.

Building Alliances and Broadening Solidarity

Although students became Serbia’s most trusted political force – a role they never initially sought – they quickly recognised that no single actor could achieve change alone. That awareness gave birth to a remarkable experiment in grassroots democracy.

Students invited citizens to organise through local assemblies (zborovi), a legal mechanism for direct participation under Serbia’s Law on Local Self-Government. These assemblies, often held in parks, occupied cultural centers, or simply on the streets, wherever large groups could gather, spread rapidly and, in many towns, became permanent forums for civic debate and coordination.

At the same time, students sought to build alliances with labour movements. They repeatedly called for a general strike in a country where, under an outdated Law on Strikes from 1996, such action has become nearly impossible. In late March, five of Serbia’s largest trade union confederations signed a joint platform with the students to push for Labour Law reform. Together, they organised what was likely Belgrade’s largest May Day rally in decades.

Solidarity broadened beyond class lines. The movement forged meaningful alliances across workers, farmers, teachers, artists, and lawyers, while supporting environmental struggles – particularly local communities resisting extractivist megaprojects such as the proposed lithium mine in the Jadar Valley.

The example of Novi Pazar, a Bosniak-majority city long treated as peripheral, became especially symbolic: it moved to the very center of the movement. This stood in sharp contrast to the regime’s nationalist politics, showing that a society long marked by ethnic divisions may now be undergoing a genuine transformation.

From Concessions to Crackdown

Initially, the regime tried to contain discontent with superficial concessions – a modest wage increase for teachers, promises of subsidised housing loans for young people, and belated resignations from the prime minister, key ministers, and the mayor of Novi Sad. Yet none of these addressed the core issue: responsibility for the canopy collapse. Any genuine investigation would expose the corruption network sustaining the regime’s power. That is precisely why, nearly a year later, the judicial process remains stalled, and key documentation on the Novi Sad railway station reconstruction is still not fully disclosed to the public.

As the movement persisted, repression escalated. Activists were beaten, detained without cause, and held for months. Teachers who supported students and protests lost their income or jobs. University staff faced funding cuts for supporting students. Hooligans and petty criminals were deployed to attack. Some of them, even after being arrested and proven to have committed acts of violence, were later pardoned by the president himself. In cynical contrast, Independent media outlets were branded “terrorists” by the very same president and other government officials, just like the protesters, signaling that the regime now sees truth and dissent as existential threats.

Between East and West

The student movement has unfolded amid Serbia’s fraught geopolitical balancing act. President Vučić has portrayed the protests as a Western-backed “colour revolution,” yet his government maintains close ties with all major powers – from Washington and Paris to Moscow and Beijing.

The EU has largely turned a blind eye to democratic backsliding in exchange for stability, cooperation on Kosovo, and access to Serbia’s lithium deposits, essential for Europe’s green transition. Meanwhile, Belgrade buys billions in French warplanes, welcomes opaque Chinese infrastructure investments, refuses to sanction Russia, and simultaneously exports weapons to both Ukraine and Israel.

This “multi-vector” diplomacy allows Vučić to appear indispensable to everyone. In this context, the students stand largely alone: an internally pluralistic, homegrown force resisting authoritarian rule without foreign patrons.

Their symbolism blends national and civic imagery, reclaiming the Serbian flag from the ruling party, which long ago appropriated national symbols by equating itself with both the state and the national interest. Liberal public opinion, both in Serbia and across Europe, has often viewed this process with suspicion, sporadically accusing the student movement of nationalism or pro-Russian sympathies, with little to no understanding of the actual context. Accusations of being “pro-Russian” have in particular proven hollow, since students have marched to Brussels and cycled to Strasbourg, directly appealing to European institutions for support, not Moscow.

The regime, however, has weaponised Serbia’s “multi-vector” foreign policy, presenting itself as equally friendly with Washington, Brussels, Moscow, and Beijing – and exploiting that ambiguity to smear the protests from all sides. At home, it brands the students as Western agents serving foreign interests. Abroad, it portrays them as a Russian-backed destabilising force. This strategic schizophrenia allows the government to appear as a pillar of stability to every major power, while discrediting its own citizens as pawns of the opposite camp.

The Turn Toward Elections

Six months into the mobilisation – which brought between five and ten percent of Serbia’s population into Belgrade’s streets in a single day – students shifted course. Realising that their original demands could not be met under the current administration, they called for snap parliamentary elections.

They also began forming a student electoral list through a direct-democratic process. To protect prospective candidates from retaliation, names will be announced only once elections are officially called. Their political platform, described as “revolutionary,” aims not just to win seats but to fundamentally transform institutions over a full mandate.

Public support for both elections and the student list is striking. According to a nationally representative survey by the independent watchdog CRTA, almost two-thirds of citizens see early elections as the only way out of the crisis. If elections were held now, 44% would vote for the student list, compared to 32% for the Vučić-led bloc and around 10% for opposition parties. Serbia is polarised, but the demand for change is clearly majoritarian.

A Movement Rooted in Practice

The movement’s strength lies in practice, not branding. It is plural, intergenerational, and grounded in lived experience. It builds democratic structures (citizen assemblies), forges cross-sector alliances (with trade unions, farmers, teachers, lawyers, cultural workers, IT workers, etc), and re-centers neglected regions.

Initially focused on rule of law and meritocracy, its agenda has expanded toward socioeconomic questions: ownership, public goods, and inequality, suggesting a deepening social consciousness.

Like many social movements before it, Serbia’s uprising is ideologically fluid — a broad camp encompassing everything from conservatives to radicals, from left to right. Yet for now, it remains the only living force capable of challenging Vučić’s authoritarian, neoliberal, and nationalist regime. The programme the students are drafting will inevitably have flaws, just as their electoral list will be ideologically diverse. What matters most is that the movement itself does not fall silent. Progressive groups have already begun forming the Social Front — a loose network of organisations, trade unions, and parts of the student and activist base. The idea is that this front will serve as a lever of social struggle, pushing for justice and equality both in the streets and beyond the elections.

The regime, by contrast, appears in defensive decline: refusing elections, leaning on police and security services, and betting that fatigue will outlast hope. Students and their allies are betting the opposite – that only genuinely free elections can defuse the crisis peacefully.

Serbia’s structural problems cannot be solved overnight. But regime change could at least create the conditions for democratic progress.

If the protests and their organisational backbone are crushed, repression will be brutal and the message clear: never try again. Yet if they endure, the door to a different future – more just, democratic, and humane – will remain open.

For the European Union and the broader international community, the message is equally clear: genuine democratic renewal in the Balkans will not come from summit diplomacy, but from the streets.