After Two Years on the Streets, Serbia's Student Movement Takes on Vucic at the Ballot Box

Serbia's students, who have protested in the streets for two years, have now entered the election arena demanding to lead the government. A poll published ahead of Sunday's parliamentary elections put the student-led list ahead of the ruling party — the first time in more than a decade that an opposition list has led a national poll.

For Aleksandar Vucic, who has won every election he has contested since 2012, and his ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), this vote has therefore become the toughest test yet. Analysts say the Student List stands a real chance of edging out the SNS.

The poll published on Tuesday by the independent pollster New Serbian Political Thought put the Student List narrowly ahead at 44.5 percent against 42.7 percent for Vucic's party. The margin is small, but its symbolic significance is large.

Kosta Golubovic, a 21-year-old law student at the University of Novi Sad, said Gen Z and students are rising up and fighting for a government that will invest in their futures instead of actively undermining them before they properly start their adult lives.

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, fuelled by government denials of wrongdoing that forced out the previous prime minister. Demonstrations peaked with a March 2025 rally attended by more than 325,000 people in Belgrade. Student protesters have been demanding early elections ever since.

The editor of New Serbian Political Thought, Djordje Vukadinovic, cautioned that the figures are a snapshot, not a projection, and said he had considered not publishing them at all given what he called near-hysterical attacks from the government over previous findings.

Throughout the campaign, pro-government tabloids and senior Progressive Party figures have torn into independent pollsters, branding them 'fake researchers'.

For the Student List, supporters say, the polling reflects months of concerted door-to-door canvassing in every corner of the country. Golubovic said they refused to accept that the cause was lost, or that there were pro-SNS dead zones they should not reach out to — while previously only the Progressive Party had the capacity to campaign nationwide.

Vucic, 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, has also taken his campaign on the road — at times driving himself to rallies in a black Skoda while singing folk songs, posted on his TikTok account, where he hosts live question-and-answer sessions.

His gimmicky political ads have also drawn attention. 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 Srdanovic, and a cabbage-pickling stone — folksy touches aimed at an everyman image.

Vucic'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, and Vucic 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, and were conspicuously slow to say anything as the student protests grew.

Igor Novakovic of the International and Security Affairs Center explained that in the past the opposition could not mount sustained challenges as Vucic's power and control over the media and key institutions grew. But the student-led movement is heavily depersonalised, he said, and has built a single platform centred on rule-of-law issues with broad appeal, keeping divisive questions off the table.

The government's first line of attack was that students could not run a country. The protesters answered by hand-picking a list of candidates including doctors, engineers and professors — people who made their careers outside politics. Golubovic said many people are happy to hear that a candidate is not a politician but, say, a doctor, and that it is not hard to pitch the idea that an expert will help more than someone whose main skill is talking into a microphone for 30 years.

The students have also built a social media machine which, by their own count, includes some 900 influencers with a combined reach of more than 40 million followers. On ruling-party TikTok or X posts, the first comments, each with hundreds or thousands of likes, repeat the campaign motto — 'Studenti pobedjuju!', or the students will win.

Novakovic warned that even if the Student List wins, it will face a heavily entrenched system and bureaucracy, and the transition will not be easy. A win for Vucic would come with challenges of its own: the SNS and the government are heavily wounded, and even if they do not lose outright, they will face a period of weakened legitimacy and authority.