Sitting in the trashy garden of a café frequented by students near an iconic Belgrade market, we are, naturally, discussing the elections. A somewhat hippieish father of a friend complains that the situation is terrible, that he’s never seen such polarization, and that decades-old colleagues are barely on speaking terms. He tells me he tried to lighten the atmosphere, joking “Guys, I am neutral, you can relax, you can all be yourselves with me.” His remark didn’t sit well with either camp. Nobody in Serbia these days seems to like “neutrals,” though it seems that this despised group could decide the outcome of the October 25 parliamentary elections.

There is an electric mood in the country. There have already been irregularities and sporadic individual acts of violence against opponents by members of the ruling party, with more widely expected before the vote. Previous police violence against protesters and the alleged use of a sonic weapon during a March 2025 demonstration are still vivid in the collective memory. The latter has even become the subject of Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s fifteen-channel video installation currently exhibited in Venice. Few expect election day to pass peacefully.

Aleksandar Vučić — competing to become prime minister, to which end he recently stepped down as president — is mainly communicating to his nominally “progressive” party’s (the Serbian Progressive Party, or SNS) own base, trying to harden its core vote and prevent defections. Student protesters, who registered as a group of citizens under the name “Student List–Students Win,” are campaigning under the slogan “Serbia or Mafia,” pointing out corruption, para-police gangs, and connections between the state and organized crime. They’re trying to capture all the neutral and still-undecided voters, those lacking information or interpretations of what’s going on, as well as past abstainers. There’s a fight for every vote, including those in the diaspora who will now have to be stubborn to get their votes counted: due to the authorities’ controversial decision, some will have to vote in the middle of the night or even fly thousands of miles to cast a ballot, if they can afford it.