Serbia’s Democratic Breakthrough

It took almost two years of student movement protest, set off by the deaths of sixteen people under the collapsed canopy of the Novi Sad railway station in November 2024, to achieve what Serbia’s established opposition had failed to do for more than a decade: defeat Aleksandar Vučić. Along the way, the students found a language that travelled far beyond the campuses. Pumpaj (‘keep pumping’) went from an internet joke to a chant heard in every town square; the pro-government tent camp in Pioneers Park was christened Ćacilend[1]; and groups of students cycled to Strasbourg and ran a relay to Brussels to deliver letters to European institutions. By March 2025 they could bring an estimated 325,000 people onto the streets of Belgrade.

On 25 October, the Student List won 53.7% of the vote and 141 of the 250 seats, ending 14 years of rule by the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS); Vučić, who had resigned the presidency in September to lead his party’s list, conceded on election night. The Student List brought together public figures who were selected through votes in student assemblies (plenums) and vetted through a review process across participating faculties. Whether the breakthrough can also revive Serbia’s long-stalled European integration is a separate and harder question.

[1] Ćaci comes from a pro-government graffito telling students in blockade to go back to class, which misspelt đaci (pupils) as ćaci. The irony – regime loyalists lecturing students about school while unable to spell the word for pupils – was not lost on the protesters, who adopted ćaci as a mocking label for government supporters, implying they were semi-literate. The camp set up in Pioneers Park in March 2025 by a group calling itself “students who want to study” was duly dubbed Ćacilend. Vučić later embraced the term defiantly, declaring that he, too, was a