The Serbian student movement has gone from protest to power within just two years. In Government, it will face significant internal and external pressures that will require the movement to keep organising and mobilising.

Dragan Plavšić is a member of Counterfire in London and of Marks21 in Serbia. He jointly edited The Balkan Socialist Tradition and the Balkan Federation 1871-1915 (2003).

Cross-posted from Counterfire

Picture by ImStevan

The victory of the Student List in Serbia’s parliamentary elections is tremendous. Standing for the first time, it won a majority, taking a projected 140 of the 250 seats. The 14-year grip on power of authoritarian President Aleksandar Vučić, who hoped to slip seamlessly into the office of Prime Minister, taking power with him, has been decisively broken by a student-led mass movement. Sparked two years ago by the collapse of a reconstructed railway station canopy that killed 16 people, the movement forced one prime minister to resign in 2025. Now it has forced the president out.

The mobilisations since 2024 have been determined and relentless. Tapping into a deep vein of popular discontent not merely with Vučić but also with the opposition, they have shown that an entrenched political establishment can be overturned when people who have lost faith in conventional politics organise independently.

But tremendous as it is, the victory raises a vital question. What happens when a movement built by collective action and democratic participation enters state institutions? The answer now hangs in the balance between the possibility of a new, progressive phase in Serbian politics and the danger of another missed opportunity. Much will depend on whether the movement remains rooted in the mass mobilisations that brought it to power but also whether it can link up with the wider social revolt against neoliberalism currently spreading across Europe.

From tragedy to revolt

The tragic canopy collapse of November 2024 exposed the Vučić administration’s corruption, its cronyism and the subordination of accountability to economic and political connections. The ensuing wave of anger was led by students demanding publication of documents relating to the canopy’s reconstruction and the prosecution of those responsible.

What began as a demand for accountability quickly became a wider revolt against Vučić. Crucially, the movement challenged not merely individual abuses but the underlying assumption that the lack of power of ordinary people over the institutions governing their lives was inevitable.

University occupations, demonstrations, roadblocks and rallies spread across Serbia. Students travelled between towns and villages, building solidarity with people long abandoned by a political system only too accustomed to serving the rich and powerful. Teachers, university staff, workers and other citizens joined them.

The students became the mobilising force of the struggle. Their resolute independence from the official opposition and their commitment to collective deliberation and decision-making at university plenums were the movement’s defining strengths.

The decision to contest the elections was the next step in the struggle. The movement developed its own electoral list with candidates drawn from universities and wider society and nominated at university and faculty assemblies where they were collectively scrutinised by students before being selected. None of the candidates was a student.

In fact, the resulting list of hitherto politically non-aligned academics, doctors, activists and citizens – among them an ex-governor of the National Bank of Serbia and a former basketball star – was a decidedly mixed bag. While its strength lies in its origins in a mass democratic movement, its political direction is unclear and as such open to powerful pressures, internal and external.

The movement’s decision to contest the election was understandable given this was be a do-or-die moment for the Vučić regime. But elections are a means of advancing a movement’s demands which should not be mistaken for ends in themselves.

A victory against neoliberalism?

Although the Student List emerged from anti-corruption protests and prioritises the rule of law and institutional accountability, its programme also addressed everyday social issues: limiting temporary employment contracts to 12 months, sharply reducing the price of essential medicines, restoring village medical clinics and providing free school textbooks for all primary and secondary pupils.

These demands took the movement beyond institutional reform towards the material needs of ordinary people, their modest character notwithstanding. As such, they raise a bigger question: can political change challenge the economic priorities behind the inequalities and insecurities the demands are designed to address rather than simply changing who governs?

Here the struggle connects with the wider European revolt against neoliberalism and its decades-long project of subordinating public services and workers’ rights to market priorities, competition and fiscal restraint. Governments everywhere claim resources are scarce and public spending must be controlled, yet the consequences fall everywhere on students facing higher education costs, workers struggling with living expenses, families priced out of housing and public-sector employees expected to do more for less.

A government that removes Vučić but leaves these problems untouched risks disappointing the very people who made victory possible. It is why who exercises power in society cannot be reduced to who occupies ministerial offices.

Serbia’s wealthy business tycoons, their networks of patronage and the role of influential figures in the state apparatus will not disappear now Vučić has lost power. They will seek to protect their interests and pressure the new government by fair means or foul. Some will present themselves as indispensable for the normal functioning of government while others will argue that economic stability necessitates compromise after compromise.

The resulting danger is that the Student List becomes increasingly detached from the social forces that made its victory possible, with electoral representatives seeing negotiations between politicians, officials and business leaders as the principal arena of politics. Meanwhile, the mass of people whose mobilisation brought them to power will be encouraged to stay at home and wait for the new government to deliver. That would be a grave mistake.

The movement’s democratic strength came from people acting collectively, scrutinising those who claimed to represent them and refusing to accept that politics should be left to a professional elite. Those principles must apply after an election as much as before it.

The university plenums should not be allowed to become merely ceremonial and perfunctory. The movement needs ongoing mechanisms by means of which students, workers and communities can debate policy, hold representatives accountable and mobilise when necessary. Independent trade unions and workplace organisation are particularly important if improvements in living standards are to be secured against resistance from employers and wealthy interests.

Democracy cannot mean simply changing the people at the top. It must mean expanding the capacity of ordinary people to influence decisions affecting their lives.

The European Union is not an ally

External pressure poses another significant danger. The EU will welcome Vučić’s defeat given tensions in relations over his ties to Russia, in particular, despite his eagerness to join the bloc. Though some EU institutions and governments have criticised democratic abuses in Serbia, this does not make the EU a disinterested supporter of popular democracy.

On the contrary, Brussels has its own strategic objectives. It wants to strengthen its role in the Balkans, secure Serbia’s geopolitical alignment and limit Russian influence regionally. A Student List victory will be viewed as an opportunity to bring Serbia more decisively into the Western camp. There will be those on the Student List who will be happy, if not eager, to assist in this shift, as last year’s student bicycle convoy to Strasbourg and running relay to Brussels to garner EU support indicated. This is likely to provoke divisions in its ranks not to mention more broadly in Serbia.

In fact, the EU’s approach to Serbia has repeatedly exposed tensions between its declared commitment to democratic standards and its willingness to accommodate political leaders when they serve European strategic interests. Despite criticism of Serbia’s disputed 2023 elections, the EU and Germany pursued a strategic partnership with Vučić’s administration to secure Serbia’s large lithium deposits. In 2024, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Belgrade as the deal was formalised, prioritising Europe’s industrial needs over Serbian democracy despite mass demonstrations against the mining project’s environmental impact.

The new government will therefore face significant pressure from the EU to demonstrate that Serbia’s political transformation also represents a geopolitical realignment. Financial assistance, investment, accession negotiations and diplomatic recognition will all become instruments of influence. Vučić has already alleged that the Student List will impose sanctions on Russia over Ukraine. Some have explicitly denied that they will; others remain reticent, suggesting potentially sharp divisions over this issue too.

This is not an argument for defending Vučić or turning towards Moscow. Russia, like the Western powers, pursues its own interests. Nor should Serbia imagine that Chinese investment offers an escape from the pressures of the international economy. The point is that replacing one external patron with another will not constitute progress. In this context, the reality is that imposing sanctions on Russia will not be about sanctions but drawing Serbia into the Western camp, and this should be resisted.

Serbia’s best course is therefore non-alignment, allowing it to maintain the freedom to develop relations with different countries without subordinating national policy to any great power. That means resisting pressure to become an instrument of Western strategy against Russia, just as it means resisting Russian attempts to exercise leverage over Serbia.

Such non-alignment does not entail diplomatic isolation. It means seeking international cooperation based on more equal, mutually beneficial relations, leaving Serbia free to criticise the EU, Russia, China or the United States as and when required. This is particularly important for a prospective government whose legitimacy rests on a movement demanding that decisions be made in the public interest rather than behind closed doors.

France, Belgium and a European revolt

The internal and external pressures will therefore be significant. They cannot be resisted from within the corridors of power, which is why the movement must keep mobilising and, in doing so, link up with the protests spreading across Europe.

In France, demonstrations that began with students protesting against deteriorating school conditions have expanded into a wider movement over living costs, wages and public services. In Belgium, students have mobilised against education cuts, higher tuition fees and worsening conditions. Similar discontent over housing, employment, education and corruption has erupted in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Albania. These movements have their own demands and political circumstances, of course, but their grievances overlap.

These are not simply generational protests. Young people are at the forefront, as in Serbia, because they face bleak prospects but also because their grievances are part of a much wider social crisis. Neoliberalism promises that market competition and fiscal discipline will bring prosperity. Instead, millions experience deteriorating public services, expensive housing, insecure employment and governments claiming there is no alternative to making ordinary people pay.

Here the defeat of Viktor Orbán in Hungary earlier this year, after 16 years in power, is a warning. It shows that the decisive question is whether political change opens up space for deeper social transformation or simply produces a new administration operating within the same economic constraints. If a similar scenario is to be avoided in Serbia, the mass movement will have to keep mobilising to challenge the neoliberal economic priorities reproducing inequality and insecurity. This is best achieved by linking up with other European and Balkan movements.

Balkan solidarity against divide and rule

The student struggle in Albania where students have also participated in a wider anti-government mobilisation over corruption, education and public services adds a critically important Balkan dimension to all this. Their struggle reflects the same core discontent with the political establishment, whether in power or in opposition, that has been motivating their Serbian counterparts.

This represents an opportunity to begin challenging the nationalist antagonisms that have divided the Balkans for generations. Because when ordinary people of different nations mobilise for shared interests in education, secure employment, public services and freedom from corruption, the possibility grows of overcoming historical injustices and unresolved grievances, particularly those of the Serbian state against the Albanians.

Joint discussions, exchanges and practical solidarity between students, workers and social movements could begin the process of establishing a different basis for relations between neighbours. The great powers, hand in hand with multinational corporations, have repeatedly sought influence in the region by exploiting existing divisions and rivalries. Greater regional cooperation could give Serbia, Albania and their neighbours more room to determine their own futures rather than being manoeuvred into competing geopolitical camps.

The struggle must continue

Defeating Vučić is a moment for celebration. But the task is not merely to replace him. It is to build a society in which democratic participation, public services and economic resources serve the majority rather than the wealthy few, and in which international cooperation begins to overcome nationalist hostility and great-power manipulation.

The power that makes such change possible lies not in the ballot box alone, but in the collective action of people prepared to struggle for a different future.

This is why mass mobilisation cannot be abandoned because an electoral victory has been achieved. For victory is also a moment of danger which needs to be faced by preserving independent mass organisation and reinforcing solidarity between students and workers in Serbia and across national boundaries with Albanians, but also French, Belgian and other European students. The students’ electoral victory needs to mark a new phase of the struggle. As a celebratory banner in Belgrade put it: ‘The regime’s fallen. The struggle’s just begun.’

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