The student movement emerged after the collapse of a concrete roof canopy of a newly renovated railway station in Novi Sad, the second-largest city, on November 1, 2024, which resulted in the death of sixteen people. Rather than being seen as a tragic incident, the event was immediately interpreted by many Serbian citizens as a result of years of state capture, nepotism, and corruption. Vigils and protests spread across the country, and students of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade decided to occupy the faculty building. The student revolt spread like wildfire, and within days, every university and every faculty in the country was occupied by the students. Over the months, its resistance attracted hundreds of thousands of supporters who gathered at the student-organized protests and marches across the country, offering support, donations, food, and accommodation for the students.

At the occupied faculties, the students organized themselves into so-called plenums — a form of assembly through which decisions were made based on the principles of direct democracy. At plenums, students have been deciding on questions connected to organizing and protests, with every student being able to raise an issue, which is then discussed and voted on. As a result, there is significantly less hierarchy in the decision-making, only (often-rotated) moderators of plenums, and working groups through which tasks are handled, such as working groups on communication with the media and the public, social networks, security at the protests, and the like. Crucially, the principles of direct democracy have spread outside of the blocked faculties, as the students called on the general public in March 2025 to also organize in citizen assemblies called zbors.

Over time, the political demands of the protest movement, centered on investigating the collapse of the Novi Sad train station and holding those in power responsible, transformed into a political program that offered a new vision for the country. Through plenums and collective deliberation and decision-making, the student movement introduced the political program as well as the list of the candidates who were to run in the elections, formed in a process that lasted more than a year. The result was a “leaderless” political force that rejected a cult of personality as a source of power, regardless of the ideology. Just as the student movement has been centered on the collective and rejected any single leader who could be targeted by authorities, the election campaign emphasized collective effort rather than any single person. An antidote to the leadership of strongmen and the concentration of power in the hands of a single person, it became a collective movement that altogether rejected the premises behind representative democracy based on a few charismatic individuals.

As the student movement wrote in its statement introducing the list of 250 candidates:

The candidates were not chosen by party leaders, nor did anyone compile a list in a room and announce it to the rest. Instead, they were selected by students through a decision-making process we built over almost two years of blockades, plenums, discussions, and collaborative work. That process was neither quick nor simple. Direct democracy rarely is. It entails dialogue, disagreement, argumentation, revisiting decisions, and accountability toward the people participating in the process. That is precisely why it was important to us that we form the electoral list in this way. If we say we want a different political system, it makes no sense that our first step toward that goal is replicating the very model we are fighting against.

The student movement refused from the beginning to work with the opposition parties and with anyone who had prior experience in Serbian politics, arguing for a completely new beginning. A crucial aspect of the program is trust in experts to run public institutions rather than political appointees. As the students put it in the program, they will seek to “abolish political patronage” and “appoint proven experts rather than party loyalists to head public enterprises.” While many of the Western societies have seen in the past several years an organized erosion of public trust in science and expertise, notably with Donald Trump’s attack on climate science and COVID-19 conspiracies, the student movement has moved in the opposite direction. As a result, more than half of the candidates on the student list have a doctorate. Many are university professors who supported the students during their blockades; others are doctors, engineers, or lawyers; but the list also includes journalists, actors, and artists, as well as farmers and agricultural workers — all experts in their areas. Yet there were no students or opposition politicians. The student movement ran a campaign focused on anti-corruption and pro-democratic efforts, as well as rebuilding the institutions, which ultimately led to their victory.

Vučić’s rule was marked by strong control of the media landscape and by the oppression of those who opposed him, from police violence to targeting students, journalists, and activists with Israeli spyware technology on their phones. Yet the student movement did not overthrow an isolated dictator, but a leader who was a strategic partner for a range of geopolitical actors. Vučić’s authoritarian regime has proven useful for the European Union and China alike, Serbia’s largest trading partners and foreign direct investors, but also to the United States, Russia, Israel, and many others. During his time in power, Vučić strengthened Serbia’s ties to Russia as well as to Donald Trump and his family, and he ramped up arms exports to Israel in the past three years — which have increased by forty-two times since 2023, when Israel began its genocidal campaign in Gaza.

As for the EU, one of its key interests in Serbia has been a large deposit of lithium, the mining of which, however, attracted widespread resistance due to the potential environmental impact of the mine planned by an Anglo-Australian mining corporation, Rio Tinto. In 2024, the EU signed a strategic partnership with Serbia on developing the electric vehicle value chain, for which lithium is a key component. In June 2025, during the height of the student protests, the EU chose to ignore countless open letters and petitions, which warned that the support for lithium mining would jeopardize the EU’s image in Serbia, and designated the planned lithium mine as a strategic project under its Critical Raw Materials Act.

The EU’s continuous support for lithium mining despite local concerns for the environment and democratic decision-making is a key reason why relations with the EU played a surprisingly small role in the elections. Unlike at pro-democracy protests in Georgia or Hungary, EU flags were notably missing at the student protests in Serbia. That is also why the student victory should not be necessarily interpreted as a turn toward the EU and the West more generally. Zlatko Kokanović, a farmer who has been at the center of anti-lithium protests and who was a candidate on the Student List, said that he would advocate for a permanent ban on the exploration and exploitation of lithium in Serbia.

Yet the student movement did not emerge from a vacuum. Vučić had faced challenges to his rule and countless protests, from the 2017 protests “Against Dictatorship,” which erupted a day after Vučić won the presidential election, to the aforementioned protests against lithium mining, which spread in 2021 and 2022, attracting tens of thousands of people in protests and blockades and forcing the government to officially cancel the mining project in 2022 (though the cancellation was later nullified, days before the Strategic Partnership with the EU was signed in 2024). Crucially, the different movements were not isolated from one another but cooperated in many ways, with the anti-lithium movement and the students converging on the issue of environmental protection. Still, none of the protest movements was able to mobilize as many people as the student movement.

The slogan “Serbia or the Mafia” helped foster the atmosphere of a referendum between two choices: the Student List on one hand and Vučić’s regime on the other. This was further underscored by the fact that most opposition parties decided against running, to avoid watering down the vote for the Student List. The student movement is widely heterogeneous, with diverse ideologies across the Left and the Right coming together, ranging from nationalists to pro-EU liberals, yet united against authoritarian rule. Still, the political program was clearly centered on anti-corruption efforts, media freedom, food sovereignty, health and environmental protection, and supporting workers’ rights, with initiatives including an improvement of health care access in rural areas and amending the Labor Law to increase job security. As one of the candidates of the Student List, Aleksandar Čupić, a professor at the Faculty of Transport, said in an interview, the goal is to “depoliticize institutions and politicize the society. We should all be concerned with politics.”

When the student movement organized a final political gathering before the elections on Thursday, October 22, drawing over 150,000 people to Slavija Square in Belgrade, it promised that after years of protests this would be the last time when the citizens would need to gather in such large numbers.

Yet after Aleksandar Vučić conceded on Sunday evening, people flooded the streets, spontaneously gathering in celebration. Slavia was again filled with tens of thousands of people, though this time in euphoric celebration. The atmosphere was electrifying, with cars honking on the roads, people coming out on their balconies, whistling and shouting in joy. Another day of celebration was scheduled for Monday evening.

The morning after the victory, people gathered in Pionirski Park, just across from the parliament, which had been occupied for a year and a half by pro-government thugs who set up their tents there and threatened passersby and supporters of the students. Though the thugs were finally gone, garbage had piled up. The citizens began cleaning the park and fixing the playground while playing music and dancing in celebration — a small example of all the work that lies ahead of the Student List and their supporters yet an important symbol of citizen organizing.

Undoubtedly, victory in the elections is just the beginning. The geopolitical conditions that enabled Vučić’s rule remain in place, just as the structures of global capitalism do. For his part, Vučić is unlikely to retire from political life but will focus on recapturing his power. Within the Student List, ideological differences, which were set aside for the sake of defeating Vučić, might become more visible, especially when it comes to the questions of nationalism, the approach to Kosovo, and foreign policy more broadly.

Still, by winning the elections, the Serbian students demonstrated that no strongman is untouchable, no matter how deeply entrenched in the system and how unfair the conditions are. The tectonic change in how people understand politics and decision-making has already happened, and it is spreading fast. The global challenge to a handful of leaders who deepen inequalities and sow divisions will only continue to rise.