Serbia's Student List challenges Vučić's 12 years in power as a snap election tests a two-year protest movement

On Thursday, the last day of campaigning, rallies were held across Serbia ahead of a snap parliamentary election on Sunday. It has been billed as a referendum on the country's future, and it comes after two years of student protests that now threaten the 12-year hold on power of the populist leader Aleksandar Vučić.

The protests began on 1 November 2024, when a concrete canopy collapsed outside the railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia's second-largest city, and killed 16 people. The disaster came to stand for corruption and negligence in the country. Critics tied the station's fatally flawed renovation to Vučić, who had closely associated himself with the project.

What began as weekly student protests demanding justice, on campuses and in city streets, grew into a national movement, often organised at local level. It drew in farmers, actors and judges. The Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), which Vučić founded, was shaken, and within weeks the prime minister resigned. In March 2025 Belgrade saw one of its largest protests ever. The movement had no formal leader and ran itself through student assemblies, known as plenums.

Now it has turned into an electoral force. The Student List-Students Win is fielding candidates drawn from across Serbian society. They are not students: they include teachers, university professors, actors, doctors, farmers and scientists. The movement still says it has no leaders, but its top candidate is Ilija Srdanović, a cardiology professor in Novi Sad. Others include the former basketball star Dejan Bodiroga, the actor Tihomir Stanić and Dejan Šoškić, a former governor of the National Bank of Serbia. Joining students marching toward Belgrade, Srdanović said history was being rewritten and that "the energy is unstoppable."

The list campaigns on an 11-point programme. Its aims include a police unit to arrest those responsible for corruption, a purge of interior ministry officials who broke rules on handling protesters or who have links to organised crime, reform of a skewed media landscape with the public broadcaster freed from political control, and an end to the recruitment of party loyalists to run public enterprises. Vučić and the SNS deny corruption and deny trying to influence the media. Several opposition parties have withdrawn in favour of the Student List.

Vučić has served two terms as president and cannot seek a third, so he is leading his party in the hope of returning as prime minister, a post he left in 2017. He has repeated unfounded claims that his opponents are less students and professors than "mighty great powers" seeking to overthrow Serbia, and he has promised to end what he sees as the politicisation of schools and universities. Abroad, he has kept Serbia's EU candidacy alive while refusing to impose sanctions on Russia over its full-scale war in Ukraine. Several government ministers attended the Belgrade funeral of the war criminal Ratko Mladić, which drew EU anger at his "glorification." Helena Ivanov of the Henry Jackson Society, speaking to the BBC from Belgrade, called the students' ability to mobilise the masses something traditional opposition parties have not managed, and Vučić's biggest challenge since he took power. Defeating him, she said, will not be easy, but neither will this election be for him.

The mechanics are simple. Parliament has 250 seats, elected from a single national constituency by proportional representation. About 6.45 million registered voters can take part, and polls are open from 07:00 to 20:00 on Sunday. Eighteen lists are running, though only seven field the full 250 candidates. A list must win more than 3% to take seats.

How fair the contest is remains disputed. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has described a "tense and divisive electoral climate" and a "referendum-like atmosphere." Serbia's election commission says the vote is free and the ballot secret. The independent watchdog CRTA, however, has reported threats, physical violence and surveillance of opposition activists, and said that ministries and local governments became involved in "electoral engineering." It also found that almost three-quarters of TV coverage went to government representatives. The European Centre for Press and Media Freedom has recorded some 160 attacks on media and journalists in Serbia this year.

European observers will be monitoring Sunday's vote. The questions are whether the Student List clears the 3% threshold, and whether the SNS keeps its dominance of the 250-seat parliament.