Tonight in Belgrade, Aleksandar Vučić told officials that, based on a stratified sample, the Serbian Progressive Party had lost the country’s parliamentary election to a list of 250 candidates chosen by student plenums – open assemblies at each faculty where any student can speak and vote.
On his own figures the Student List is heading for between 135 and 140 of the 250 seats in the National Assembly, against around 105 for his United Serbia coalition, with no other list clearing the threshold.
If the electoral commission’s official count confirms it, that’s a clear majority to form a government and the end of 14 years of populist SNS rule.
When I wrote about Serbia’s students back in January 2025, protesters had just called a general strike, Prime Minister Miloš Vučević was offering a non-binding “advisory referendum”, and you could pretty much flip a coin on whether the movement would grow or whether worries about a written-off academic year would let the government ride it out.
Twenty-one months on, students look to have secured an extraordinary win, the intervening period a long tale of Serbia’s universities, its student plenums, an argument about who gets to speak for students, and a victory against the corruption that brought down a canopy in Novi Sad.
The government’s first response was to try to pay its way out of trouble. In March 2025 parliament passed amendments to the Law on Higher Education that halved tuition fees and raised the higher education budget by 20 per cent, with Speaker Ana Brnabić declaring the fourth student demand fulfilled and expressing the hope that everyone could now return to classes.
Students stayed out, partly because their demands were about accountability for 16 deaths rather than fees, and partly because, as activists pointed out, the budget rise only ever applied to the material costs portion of university funding.
The government then tried sanctions. A decree shifted academics’ working week from an equal split between teaching and research to 35 hours of teaching and five of research, which meant that staff at blockaded faculties who weren’t teaching stopped being paid for research, leaving many on as little as €70 a month, while Vučić mused publicly that professors backing the blockades would get “potatoes” instead of salaries.
In May 2025, after six months without a meaningful response, students switched from demanding accountability to demanding snap elections, turning an anti-corruption protest into an anti-government one.
By the summer a new education minister, Dejan Vuk Stanković, was tying enrolment quotas to faculties resuming classes, and most had done so by July, even though students stayed in the buildings.
From there the government’s attention shifted to universities themselves, helped by a quirk of Serbian law under which police can only enter a faculty if the dean invites them.
In August 2025 the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad asked police to break up a blockade that had lasted nine months, and days later the dean of the city’s sports faculty re-entered his building with masked companions on the ten-month anniversary of the canopy collapse.
In January 2026 students and staff at the same philosophy faculty were forcibly removed by gendarmerie after protesting the dismissal of associate professor Jelena Kleut, and in June the University of Novi Sad’s senate voted not to reappoint Vladimir Mihić after 24 years at the faculty.
In Niš, the ministry pushed ahead with carving history, Serbian studies, and Russian studies out of the Faculty of Philosophy to create a new Faculty of Serbian Studies, despite the university council refusing to back it, and by September staff who refused to move had gone nearly two months without salaries or health insurance.
In March a 25-year-old student died after falling from a fifth-floor window at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, and pro-government tabloids immediately set about blaming the rector and the dean, Danijel Sinani.
Anti-corruption police raided the rectorate and seized its servers, and days later, on the university’s own Students’ Day, information minister Boris Bratina said students should know that police had the right to beat and kill them.
Sinani was attacked in the street in September, reportedly to shouts of “blokader”, and just this week Citizen Lab and the SHARE Foundation confirmed that Đokić’s phone had been infected with Pegasus spyware earlier this year.
You’ll remember the tactic Vučić reached for in December 2024, when he ostentatiously met “official” student representative SKONUS president Margareta Smiljanić and other “representatives of the legitimately elected students” to imply that the people in the blockades spoke for nobody.
Days before the huge Belgrade protest of March 2025, SNS supporters went further, setting up a camp outside the presidency and billing themselves as “students who want to study”, a group that turned out to include people who weren’t students at all and which Serbians quickly nicknamed Ćaciland.
Smiljanić, meanwhile, was still at it this summer, telling a parliamentary committee that plenum students had been given separate rooms at universities and alleging “black lists” at Novi Sad that kept other students out of buildings.
The regime spent two years insisting that the formally constituted student bodies were the legitimate voice of students – and it’s now been swept from office by a list selected through the unofficial ones.
Students deliberately kept themselves off the winning list, with the plenums’ rulebook, known as the Directive, barring anyone enrolled in 2024/25 or with studies on hold so that nobody could accuse them of building political careers on the back of the protests.
Former members of the ruling coalition’s 20 parties were barred too, as were former officials of parliamentary opposition parties, which left a roster of doctors, academics, artists, farmers, and former athletes headed by Ilija Srdanović, a cardiologist and professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Novi Sad.
In Belgrade the plenums had voted 29 to 5 to demand snap elections but only 23 to 9 to run their own list, and the strict rules on who could stand were basically a promise to the losing side that running wouldn’t turn the movement into the kind of party it had set out to replace.
Plenums went on to challenge 99 of more than 300 potential candidates in August, removed 38 candidates and substitutes in September, and on 6 September voted 43 of 85 to remove Vladan Đokić, the University of Belgrade rector who had backed the students from the start and whom many had expected to lead the list.
The plenums agreed in principle in June 2025 to limit their MPs’ mandates to 16 to 18 months, but the limit was later struck out in a vote so close that the row over late ballots became what the plenums themselves called a “constitutional crisis of the blockades”.
What survived is a pledge of “moral and political” responsibility with no enforcement mechanism, partly because Serbia’s Constitutional Court long ago outlawed the undated resignation letters parties used to control their representatives, which means the mandate belongs to the MP rather than the list.
As Sadie Zarris argues in The Loop, before an election the plenums can take a name off the list, but after it they can’t take back a seat. Nor is the precedent encouraging, given that Otpor, the student movement that helped topple Milošević in 2000, became a conventional party, won just 1.7 per cent in 2003, and merged into the Democratic Party a year later.
That will be tested quickly, because a presidential election is due by 27 December. The plenums have already adopted a procedure for choosing a candidate, but a movement designed to stop anyone rising above the assemblies will now need to find someone who can.
There’s an immediate higher education agenda too, taking in the government’s working group on a new Law on Higher Education, a reconstituted University of Belgrade council with government seats that is about to decide how Đokić’s successor is chosen, the dismissed and unrenewed staff from Novi Sad to Novi Pazar, and a Faculty of Serbian Studies that one Niš sociologist predicted would last as long as this government lasts.
Last time I wrote about all of this I argued that by noting that while the government might have reached the end of its strength, students almost certainly hadn’t, and that, as in 1968 and through the late eighties and nineties, everything would rest on whether the wider public’s sympathy with “the students” grew or waned.
That sympathy grew, with turnout in the first three hours today more than double what it had been at the same point in 2023, and the polls that had Vučić ahead turned out to be wrong.
Formal structures of student representation – the councils, the conferences, and the “legitimately elected” – do matter, but legitimacy in the end depends on whether students and the public believe a body speaks for them, and the assemblies in Serbia’s occupied faculties managed that while SKONUS, for all its meetings with ministers, did not.
Holding onto it once their candidates are sitting in the National Assembly, answerable to the plenums only by consent is the challenge now.