Libération: In Serbia, how students brought down Aleksandar Vučić’s “electoral autocracy”

Read the original article: liberation.fr/international/europe/en-serbie-comment-les-etudiants-ont-fait-tomber-lautocratie-electoraledaleksandar-vucic-20261026_KG27APCT3JGQ7LEP67STOYNB2I

Author: Nelly Didelot
26 October 2026

In these murky times of a rising far right and attacks on democracy, Serbia turned the tables on Sunday, October 25, writing a new page in its history that reads almost like a political fairy tale. In power for twelve years as prime minister, then president, then aspiring prime minister, the nationalist Aleksandar Vučić and his SNS party were defeated in the parliamentary elections by the Student List, with 52% of the vote against 39%. It is a crushing victory for a civil society movement, born of two years of repressed protests, which organised itself without a leader, without many resources and far from the traditional political parties, to bring down its exact opposite.

From the height of his twelve years in power, Vučić controlled the institutions of the state, a party turned into a clientelist machine, and most of the media. He had made Serbia a “partly free” country, according to the NGO Freedom House, and an “electoral autocracy”, according to the Swedish research institute V-Dem.

On Sunday, the former president quickly acknowledged the results, blaming them on a “revolution carried out with the direct support of several European countries and the American deep state, which is also against President Trump”. At the same moment, in the streets of Belgrade and Novi Sad, thousands of people were jumping for joy into the night.

A rejection of clientelism

Their victory was born of their tenacity. The anti-Vučić movement has been taking to the streets for almost two years, ever since the canopy of the Novi Sad railway station collapsed in November 2024, killing sixteen people. The structure, which had just been renovated at an astronomical cost and under dubious conditions, became the symbol of a public fed up with corruption. It sparked mass protests not seen since at least the fall of the Milošević regime in 2000. From the outset, it was the students who led the struggle, occupying their universities. In the face of harassment by the authorities, their initial demands for the publication of the station renovation contract evolved into broader and more political ones.

“In May 2025, when the students called for early parliamentary elections, they set an unusual condition: no student would appear on their list of candidates. The implicit message was that they wanted to remove those in office, but without taking their place,” notes Dušan Pavlović, professor of political science at the University of Belgrade, in an online analysis. In a country riddled with clientelism, where the traditional opposition parties were seen as an integral part of the “system”, this contributed greatly to their credibility. “The students were simply too young to be caught up in these networks. They had no history of appointments to public posts or political deals. In a system defined by patronage, their lack of political experience became their greatest advantage,” he adds.

When Vučić finally announced early elections last month, he sought to turn them into a weapon in his favour, stepping down as president a few months before the end of his (non-renewable) term to head the SNS list. The students, for their part, stayed true to their method. Their list is made up solely of members of civil society regarded as experts: many university professors, doctors, farmers and athletes. It includes Dejan Bodiroga, president of basketball’s EuroLeague and former star player of the Yugoslav national team, and the cardiologist Ilija Srdanović, chosen to head the list – but no official candidate for prime minister. Every name was put to a vote of the general assembly of the striking universities. The same went for the programme, centred on restoring democracy and the economy, which aims to make Serbia a country its young people would stop fleeing to work or study abroad.

The horizontal mode of organisation, used since the earliest days of the mobilisation, made the task of government propaganda harder, as it did not know which figure to target. It also shaped the organisation of the campaign, conducted mainly door to door across the country. “Horizontality was the only way to win,” says Milena Mihajlović Denić of the European Policy Centre. “It made it possible to create the referendum-like climate that was essential to victory. And two years of direct democracy organised by the students in their plenums proved that liberal, right-wing and left-wing sensibilities share common values. Ideological differences became secondary to the absolute imperative of changing the government and restoring the rule of law.”

Lessons for Europe

This “now or never” feeling also influenced another key factor in the vote. At 68.8%, turnout reached levels not seen in parliamentary elections since… 1992. The diaspora mobilised massively, despite hours of queuing at polling stations. This is what decisively tipped the balance in favour of the student list, even though the SNS gathered around 1.7 million votes, almost the same total as in the 2023 elections. “Before the student movement took shape, many disillusioned citizens abstained because they saw Vučić as unbeatable and the opposition as incapable of replacing him, which fuelled a vicious circle,” observes Dušan Pavlović.

The jubilation in Serbia’s streets and the feeling of having achieved the impossible recall the scenes in Hungary in the spring, when Viktor Orbán fell. With the notable exception of how the movement was organised (around an undisputed leader in Hungary, horizontally in Serbia), the methods of democratic victory are similar. In both cases they relied on a patient grassroots campaign, on the engagement of young people and on their political creativity to challenge an all-powerful party and subservient media. Both elected political newcomers as MPs and buried the existing opposition parties.

It is a sign of hope for Central Europe, proving that democratic backsliding is not irreversible. It also holds for the youth revolts shaking the continent. “Serbian students have shown that peaceful protests, sustained over time and built on organisation, can bring down a government,” says Milena Mihajlović Denić. In her view, the model is “replicable anywhere”.