Serbia’s Students Just Beat a Strongman. Europe’s Youth, Take Notes!

Two years after Novi Sad, the movement his government spent two years smearing will form Serbia’s next government. Every young revolt in Europe should study how they did it.

On Sunday night, Aleksandar Vučić walked to a podium at his party’s headquarters in Belgrade and admitted he had lost.

“Based on a stratified sample, it is clear that we have lost this election,” he told the room. “The student blockade list won.”

Watch: how Serbia’s students beat Vučić, in two minutes.

By his own count, the Student List will hold between 135 and 140 of the 250 seats in the National Assembly, his Serbian Progressive Party about 105, with three seats for the Vojvodina Hungarians and one for an Albanian list. Even in defeat he reached for an accusation: “Many people will be surprised, and you will realise just how much some people have lied.”

Within minutes, flares lit the streets of Belgrade under the giant screens that had carried his face all campaign.

Only once in thirty years, in 2008, had Serbian turnout passed 60 percent, Thomas van Linge noted that morning. On Sunday it passed that mark by late afternoon. By 5 p.m. turnout stood at 60.9 percent, against 47.2 percent at the same hour in 2023, according to the CeSID and Ipsos figures compiled by Europe Elects. By 7 p.m., the students’ own sample put it at 66.8 percent, 4.31 million people, about half a million more than voted in the whole 2023 election. The lines formed abroad first. Serbs in New York were lining up at 1:30 in the morning, at polling stations the students had accused the foreign ministry of keeping to a minimum. In Vienna, the line filled the street outside the consulate.

The movement that won began with a slab of concrete. In November 2024, the newly renovated canopy at the Novi Sad railway station collapsed and killed sixteen people. Students asked for the documents on the renovation, for the prosecution of the men who attacked them at a vigil for the dead, and for charges against arrested students to be dropped. The government refused, so the students blockaded their universities. They walked from Belgrade to Novi Sad to honor the dead and brought 300,000 people into the capital in March 2025. When it was clear their demands would never be met by the men in power, they demanded an election and built something to win it. In plenaries at their faculties they chose 250 candidates, doctors, lawyers, teachers, farmers and lecturers. None of the students ran, and they named no leader, which left a government that rules by smear with no face to smear.

The state answered every stage with force. Police and party loyalists beat them. The ruling party built a camp of fake “students” in central Belgrade. Citizen Lab found NSO’s Pegasus spyware on a student activist’s phone, and this month on the phone of Belgrade’s university rector, Vladan Đokić, who stood with them. On the eve of the vote, pro-Trump influencers posed at Saint Sava to tell Americans that Vučić was defending Christian Europe, and pro-government accounts called the election a “color revolution,” the name autocrats give their own citizens when those citizens vote against them.

Aleksandar Matković@salematkovic

Three pro-Trump influencers on the same day in Belgrade. All have the same script: visit the St. Sava church in Belgrade and post on how Serbia is defending Christian values and criticize Vučić’s oponents one day ahead of national elections. Two are US-based but there are more.

11:31 PM · Oct 24, 2026 · 67.7K Views

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58 Replies · 265 Reposts · 1.38K Likes

Election day brought all of it into the open. Access to the Republican Electoral Commission was blocked, so citizens could not walk in to report irregularities, Una Hajdari reported. In Lazarevac, people from the ruling party’s local office attacked an election observer, and residents surrounded the office until police had to hold a cordon at its door. In Pančevo, masked men attacked young men near a polling station, BBC News in Serbian reported. Half an hour after the record turnout came out, the police and gendarmerie began to move. Buses of gendarmes entered the National Assembly and Stari Dvor, the seat of Belgrade’s city government, a reporter for Izlaz reported, and police massed outside the electoral commission. Gendarmes with riot shields were filmed heading for RTS, the state broadcaster while people still had a few hours left to vote.

The students refused the fight they were offered. When the polls closed they told the country not to come to Belgrade: stay calm in your own cities, guard the independent observers, and wait for the protocols, the signed tally from every polling station. Dejan Bodiroga, the basketball great who ran on their list, asked Belgrade to keep away from a city center filling with police and masked men. “We must not allow anyone to jeopardize what citizens have fought for in these final hours,” he said. The regime had prepared for a riot in the capital. The students kept their people home and made the night about the count, and the count is what beat Vučić.

For Serbia, the hardest part starts now. The electoral commission still has to certify the result, and the party that has run the country since 2012 still has its people in the police, the prosecution and the press. A list whose members disagree on Kosovo, the European Union and nationalism has to agree on a cabinet without a leader to broker it. Slobodan Bubnjević, number 103 on the list, calls the refusal to name a prime minister “constitutional patriotism”: the office belongs to any citizen, and accountability matters more than a name. The demands that started all of this, the documents on the Novi Sad station and the prosecution of the men who beat the mourners, now belong to the government the students built.

Serbia will learn quickly whether a movement that won by refusing to be ruled by one man can govern without becoming one.

Young people across Europe are filling squares right now, in the lycées of Paris, the streets of Turin and the boulevards of Tirana, and they should pay attention to how the students of Serbia won. The square is where a movement learns it exists. It survives the police only if every arrest is answered together. Its demands have to become a program, and its program needs people the country already trusts, chosen in the open, with nobody at the top for the state to smear or buy. It has to go door to door wherever state television is the only voice. And on the night it matters most, it has to refuse the provocation and guard the count.

Serbia’s students did each of these things, in order, for two years, and on Sunday the strongman read out the result himself.