Serbians are heading to the polls today in a decisive election that will test whether the country has had enough of Aleksandar Vucic, the political chameleon who has dominated its politics for more than a decade.
Long queues at polling stations suggest record-high turnout. The independent research organisation CRTA estimated that turnout had already reached 19.8% by 10am, twice the level recorded at the last parliamentary election in December 2023. High turnout could favour the student opposition, which hopes to mobilise voters who have previously stayed away from the polls.
The campaign ended on October 22, with Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) and the student-backed opposition holding rival rallies in Belgrade. Tens of thousands gathered at the students’ final rally at Slavija, the capital’s busiest roundabout, in a last attempt to turn nearly two years of regular protests into political change.
The atmosphere at Slavija was euphoric. Red flares lit up the square as crowds jumped up and down to patriotic music, waved their phone torches in the air and chanted in support of the students, who have been demanding a snap parliamentary election since May 2025.
A cardboard cut-out of tennis great Novak Djokovic, who lives abroad, carried a sign reading: ‘When Djokovic returns to Serbia!’ It played on a nationalist slogan, ‘When the army returns to Kosovo’, spray-painted on buildings across the city. The joke captured something of the students’ campaign: patriotic, witty and determined to overthrow a political establishment that has long seemed impervious to challenge.
The independent Public Assemblies Archive estimated the crowd at around 150,000, based on the area occupied and average crowd density. It was the fifth enormous protest the students have organised at Slavija since the movement emerged following the collapse of a concrete canopy at Novi Sad’s recently renovated railway station in November 2024, which killed 16 people.
The movement has turned the election into a referendum on the country’s future, framing the choice as one between functioning institutions and a system built around political loyalty. "On Sunday, we are not choosing between 18 electoral lists, but between two principles and two visions: Serbia or the mafia," said Jugoslav Gasic, a doctor, university professor and parliamentary candidate.
The challenge they face is formidable. The SNS has dominated Serbian politics since 2012, and Vucic has built a powerful political machine. Yet the students have accomplished something the established opposition failed to do: give a disparate and disillusioned electorate a common cause.
The Student List, which campaigns under the name Students Win, is an unusual political coalition. Its candidates include doctors, academics, engineers, artists, farmers and sportsmen, such as former basketball star Dejan Bodiroga and actor Tihomir Stanic. At the top of the list is Ilija Srdanovic, a cardiologist and professor at the University of Novi Sad who was little known outside medical and academic circles before the protests.
The students say their candidates were selected through plenums and collective decision-making. They have avoided building the movement around a single charismatic figure, arguing that parliamentary mandates should be treated as public service rather than political prizes. It is an admirable ambition, if a difficult one to sustain in government, particularly in a country where politics has become so personalised.
The students lack both a recognisable national leader and a detailed policy programme. Their central promise is to restore independent institutions, end political patronage and make public services work for citizens rather than the ruling party. They want jobs to depend on merit rather than party membership, healthcare to be accessible without bribes and public appointments to stop being rewards for loyalty.
Beyond that, their programme is deliberately vague. To preserve unity, the students have avoided divisive questions about Serbia’s relations with Russia and the European Union, as well as Kosovo, the former province that Belgrade refuses to recognise as independent. Their supporters span different political traditions, united more by opposition to corruption than by any shared vision for organising society or the economy.
That breadth is both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. It has allowed the students to mobilise Serbians who might otherwise disagree about almost everything. But if they win enough seats to challenge the SNS, they will have to turn a movement into a functioning political force, agree on policies and find a way to govern without fracturing.
For now, their appeal rests on a simple proposition: Serbia’s political system is rotten and its citizens deserve better. The SNS, by contrast, points to years of economic growth, foreign investment and relative stability. Vucic, prime minister from 2014 to 2017 and president thereafter, remains Serbia’s most recognisable politician and a prominent figure abroad. He has cultivated friendships with leaders ranging from France’s Emmanuel Macron and the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.
He is also determined to retain power. After resigning as president last month, Vucic is seeking a return to the premiership, having reached the end of his permitted presidential terms. He heads his party’s United Serbia list, a branding choice that echoes the name of Putin’s United Russia party. If successful, the manoeuvre would allow him to continue directing the country’s politics from a different office.
Vucic said he resigned as president to campaign as an ‘ordinary citizen’. His face, however, is everywhere, from party billboards to television screens. An analysis by CRTA found that government representatives accounted for 69% of political airtime on national television during extended prime-time broadcasts between September 9 and 30, compared with 31% for the opposition. Of the coverage devoted to the Student List, 88% was negative in tone.
The imbalance is only one of the advantages enjoyed by the ruling party. The SNS has cultivated an extensive system of political patronage, particularly through the public sector, where employees face pressure to support the party, recruit voters or attend its rallies. Those who refuse risk demotion, undesirable transfers or dismissal. A recent investigation by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) collected 150 testimonies describing pressure on public-sector employees to pledge support for the SNS.
BIRN has also reported allegations by a former SNS operative who claimed he was paid hundreds of thousands of euros to provide informal security for the party, collect votes and lead a group of ten men to ensure ‘safe voters’ turned up on election day. He said he was also sent to the surreal pro-government encampment outside parliament, known as Ćacilend, to provoke trouble at student protests and help portray the demonstrators as violent. The camp was set up in response to student protests and has since been demolished. These remain allegations, not independently established findings, but they illustrate what students mean when they talk about a ‘mafia’ system.
The government has also used public spending to shore up its support. In the run-up to the election, adults received one-off payments of RSD6,000 (about €50), while pensioners were given between RSD20,000 and RSD35,000. The payments formed part of a package of pre-election spending announced in August worth nearly €1bn, including promised salary and pension increases, subsidised medicine and tourism vouchers.
Questions have also been raised about the size of the electoral register, which has grown in recent years despite Serbia’s declining population. Citizens have reported receiving voting invitations for people who no longer live at their addresses. I still receive one for my dead father. Local officials refused to register his death despite being shown his death certificate and proof that his ashes are buried in the local cemetery. In his case, the explanation appears to be bureaucratic incompetence. Whether other cases of so-called phantom voters reflect deliberate manipulation or administrative incompetence is harder to establish.
The students have countered these structural advantages with a formidable grassroots campaign. They have travelled across Serbia by bike and on foot, visiting small towns and rural communities long considered SNS strongholds and meeting voters neglected by the traditional opposition. Social media has helped them reach supporters beyond the hostile mainstream television landscape.
They have also appealed to patriotism in a way that challenges the government’s claim to own it. Their message is that loving Serbia means wanting to stay and build a fairer country, rather than accepting a system that drives its most talented young people to emigrate. It has resonated beyond the student generation, attracting older voters who may have little in common with the movement’s younger activists but share their frustration with corruption.
The contrast with the SNS’s rallies is striking. At student gatherings, crowds arrive in long columns from across the city and country, bringing an atmosphere of genuine enthusiasm. Government rallies, by comparison, have often been criticised for relying on public-sector employees pressured to attend or supporters bussed in with promises of free food and other perks.
The election is difficult to predict. Opinion polls are scarce and often partisan. A September survey by Faktor Plus put the United Serbia list on 48.6% and the Student List on 37.1%. A poll published more recently by the New Serbian Political Thought institute, however, placed the student-backed list ahead, on 44.4% against 42.7% for United Serbia. The conflicting figures suggest a close contest.
Even a strong showing may not be enough to dislodge the SNS. Vucic has spent years cultivating a political system in which loyalty is rewarded and opponents are portrayed as foreign agents and threats to national stability. His party and its supporters credit him with delivering growth, building roads and rail infrastructure, and attracting investment. His critics argue that these achievements have come at the cost of weakened institutions, diminished media freedom and a hollowing-out of parliamentary democracy.
The students’ greatest achievement may be that they have broken through the apathy and cynicism fostered by years of SNS dominance and an ineffectual opposition. Their movement has made political change seem possible again. Sunday’s election will test whether enough Serbians are prepared to exchange the relative predictability of the existing system for the uncertain promise of a fairer one.