Students seek to oust Serbia’s strongman in Sunday vote

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A battered bedsheet has become a symbol of the student movement threatening to end Serbian leader Aleksandar Vučić’s grip on power in elections on Sunday. Scrawled across it are the words “Machinists against the Machinery” — the rallying cry of engineering students who were among the first to challenge his rule.

What began two years ago as a student revolt has eclipsed Serbia’s traditional opposition and emerged as a political force in its own right: some polls suggest the Student List could overtake Vučić’s ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS).

Under the slogan “Serbia or Mafia”, the students have turned anger over pervasive corruption and the concentration of power into a direct challenge to Vučić’s 14 years in power.

Sunday’s vote could bring an end to a political era stretching back to Slobodan Milošević, the former leader who died while on trial for war crimes in The Hague. Vučić served as his information minister during the final years of the 1990s Balkan wars.

At home, Vučić has stifled independent media, favoured loyal businesses and welcomed Russian companies and émigrés. Abroad, he has courted both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump while paying little more than lip service to Serbia’s EU membership bid. Throughout, he has remained a staunch Serbian nationalist, stoking ethnic tensions and cultivating hardline Serb allies across the Balkans.

Ivan Vejvoda, co-founder of the Europe’s Futures Initiative, a Vienna-based think-tank, said Vučić’s days in power may be numbered, drawing parallels with the April election that ousted Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, a Vučić ally.

“Like Hungary, this is a crucial sign that it is possible to reverse democratic backsliding,” Vejvoda said. “There is an expiry date for these politicians. Milošević had 12 years, Orbán had 16, Vučić has had 14. People know their corruption and nepotism, and at one point it boils over.”

Opinion polls, which are highly partisan in Serbia, paint conflicting pictures of the race, with some showing the Student List comfortably ahead and others putting the ruling SNS in the lead. Vučić is seeking to emulate Putin by swapping the presidency for the prime minister’s office if SNS wins the election.

The contrast between the campaigns is stark. Vučić has mobilised the full machinery of the state behind his party, with giant LED billboards blanketing entire buildings with his slogan: “Serbia is winning”. His programme is built on salary and pension hikes and geopolitical neutrality.

The students have mostly relied on social media, grassroots organising and handmade signs.

“The bedsheet is far more modest, but much closer to the people,” its creator Uroš Milosević said at the Student List stand in Petrovac, a small town in central Serbia. He said “pro-Vučić thugs tried to take it from us”, chasing them down the streets of Belgrade. “We literally had to play ‘capture the flag’ . . . They know what it means. Not just the banner — the lore behind it.”

The Student List was born out of tragedy. In 2024, a train station canopy collapsed in the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people. That event sparked protests over alleged corruption and regulatory failures around the newly built railway line.

Ilija Srdanović, a cardiologist in Novi Sad, still remembers the shock that jolted the city and spurred him to enter politics. He now tops the 250-strong Student List for parliament.

“As parents of four . . . when we first heard what had happened, we desperately tried to account for our family members,” he recalled. “The sense of horror turned into anger, then demands for consequences.”

While authorities sought to crack down on the protests, students barricaded themselves in universities across the country in a blockade that lasted more than a year and expanded to sectors including the arts, services and agriculture.

“The institutions failed to do their job, and no one has been held accountable,” Srdanović said.

Vučić failed to contain the popular revolt, which gained fresh momentum last year when his government backed plans by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, to build a Trump-branded hotel on a historic site in central Belgrade. The project was later abandoned after it emerged that officials had broken the law to secure its approval.

Betting he could retain power, Vučić called a snap election and announced he would run for premier when stepping down as president last month.

“We need an efficient, fast and energetic government, in which the principles of accountability are clearly established,” he said when he accepted the nomination for premier. In another speech he said: “The fight is only beginning.”

For all its momentum, including mass marches on the capital Belgrade, the student movement remains amorphous: it has no leader, no candidate for premier. It only published the outline of a political manifesto, not a full programme, and many of its members prefer to remain anonymous for fear of retribution.

Srdanović said: “Democracy will be the fundamental guiding principle. The constitution and laws of the Republic of Serbia will be respected. No individual has the right to make decisions beyond those limits.”

The Student List has said its first priority in government would be to root out corruption. Graft is seen as pervasive in Serbia, which last year recorded its worst score in two decades on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, dropping to the bottom of the European ranking.

On Russia, the movement pledges to preserve Serbia’s “traditional partnership” and maintain political dialogue with Moscow. While affirming Ukraine’s territorial integrity, it rules out joining western sanctions against Russia.

Students say their stance reflects Serbia’s political realities, with many voters sympathetic to Russia, a fellow Slavic Orthodox nation that, unlike the west, has never bombed Serbia.

Even Dejan Šoškić, a former central bank governor and Student List candidate, takes a pragmatic line on Russia. He advocates diversifying energy supplies to avoid dependence on any single supplier, but argues that Europe should reconsider its ban on cheap Russian energy. Serbia, he stressed, would not join western sanctions against Moscow.

“We have as many ideas as we have members,” said Mihajlo Stamenković, an engineering student from Belgrade, while campaigning in Petrovac. “But the ideology, the disagreements, those can come later.”

Nearby, a man named Dragan sharpened knives in exchange for a modest fee. “I’m a simple guy, been a knife sharpener all my life,” he said. “I have voted for Vučić, but my family and friends, we have had enough. The students look like they can change something. I will follow them.”

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