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Serbia’s protesting students mount serious challenge to Vučić’s power
Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić has won every election he has contested since 2012, but on Sunday, a student-led movement stands a real chance of edging out his ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) in the country’s parliamentary elections.
A poll published Tuesday by New Serbian Political Thought, an independent pollster, put the Student List narrowly ahead of the Progressive Party, at 44.5% to Vučić’s 42.7% — the first time an opposition list has led a national poll ahead of an election in over a decade.
“Gen Z and students are rising up and fighting for a government that will invest in their futures instead of actively undermining us before we properly start our adult lives,” Kosta Golubović, a 21-year-old law student at the University of Novi Sad, told POLITICO.
The largest protest movement in modern Serbian history began in November 2024, when a freshly renovated railway station awning collapsed in Novi Sad, killing 16 people, including two young children.
Vigils for the dead turned into mass protests, fueled by government denials of wrongdoing that forced out the previous prime minister. Demonstrations drew huge crowds, peaking with a March 2025 rally attended by more than 325,000 people in Belgrade. Student protesters have been demanding early elections ever since.
A fraught campaign
New Serbian Political Thought’s editor Đorđe Vukadinović cautioned that the polling figures released by his outlet are a snapshot, not a projection, adding that he had considered not publishing the results at all given what he called “near-hysterical” attacks and reactions from the government to its previous findings.
Pro-government tabloids and senior Progressive Party figures have spent the election campaign tearing into independent pollsters, branding them “fake researchers.”
But for the Student List, the polling reflects months of concerted door-to-door canvassing to reach every corner of the country, as well as something Serbia’s established opposition parties may be short of after more than a decade of fighting SNS’s omnipresence in the country: the stubborn persistence of youth.
“We have the energy. We refused to accept that this was a lost cause or accept there were pro-SNS dead zones that we didn’t reach out to,” Golubović said, explaining that the Progressive Party was the only party that previously had the capacity to mount nationwide campaigns.
Vučić, who has been in power as president or prime minister for 12 years and stood down as president to run as a prime ministerial candidate in the forthcoming elections, has also taken his campaign on the road. At times, he has driven himself to election rallies in a black Škoda while singing folk ditties, all posted on his TikTok account, where he hosts live Q&A sessions.
Vučić’s penchant for gimmicky political ads has also come to the fore in the campaign. In one, he plays a restaurant waiter taking orders from a Serbian family. The grandfather asks for no sanctions on Russia, while the others ask for new highways, higher salaries and better pensions.
In another, he sits across from an empty chair bearing a photograph of the Student List’s lead candidate Ilija Srdanović and a cabbage-pickling stone, traditionally used in the Balkans to weigh down barrels full of sauerkraut in the fall — all part of his attempts to include folksy and everyman details in his campaign.
Looking the other way
Vučić’s Progressive Party has spent 14 years as the West’s awkward but indispensable partner in the Balkans.
Serbia, an EU candidate country, has refused to sanction Russia. Vučić flew to Moscow for President Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day parade last year. European leaders have mostly looked the other way, valuing a predictable Belgrade over a democratic one. As student protests grew, they were conspicuously slow to say anything.
In the past, the opposition were unable to mount sustained challenges to the ruling party — especially as Vučić’s power and control over the media and key institutions grew, explained Igor Novaković from the International and Security Affairs Center.
But the student-led movement is “heavily depersonalized,” said Novaković, and is focused on issues with broad electoral appeal. “They managed to create a single unitary platform which is mainly centered around issues related to the rule of law. All the issues that previously divided the Serbian electorate were not in the cards,” he added.
The government’s first line of attack against the growing political movement was to argue that students could not run a country. So the protesters built a list of hand-picked candidates, including doctors, engineers and professors — people who made their careers outside of politics.
“Many people are happy to hear that someone isn’t a politician but, say, a doctor,” Golubović said. “It isn’t hard to pitch the idea that an expert is going to help more than someone whose main skill is to talk into a microphone for 30 years straight.”
Crucially, the students have built a social media machine which, by their own count, includes some 900 influencers with a combined reach of more than 40 million followers.
The effect is visible on any ruling-party TikTok or X post, where the first dozen back-to-back comments, each with hundreds or even thousands of likes, repeat the campaign’s motto — “Studenti pobeđuju!” or the students will win.
If Student List is victorious in the elections, argues Novaković, it will face “a heavily entrenched system and bureaucracy, and that could be really demanding. The transition will not be easy.”
A win for Vučić and his party, meanwhile, would come with challenges of its own. “SNS and the government are heavily wounded,” he added. “Even if they don’t lose outright, they will face a period of weakened legitimacy and authority.”
