Aleksandar Vucic, who has shaped Serbia’s political life for more than a decade, has lost snap parliamentary elections to a student-led movement that led protests against him for almost two years. After a heated race, Vucic conceded defeat to the Student List in Sunday’s elections, which saw voter turnout reach its highest level in more than 30 years. The student movement emerged after 16 people were killed when a train station canopy collapsed in the city of Novi Sad on November 1, 2024.
The youth-led protests grew into a broader wave of social unrest and evolved into the Student List political platform, which promised to tackle corruption, depoliticise public institutions and restore citizens’ rights. During the election campaign, the movement was led by Ilija Srdanovic, a professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Novi Sad. Vucic referred to the demonstrators, who included university professors, doctors and workers, as “blockaders” and accused them of seeking to destabilise Serbia.
A former ultranationalist, Vucic cultivated an image of a pragmatic leader who maintained ties with the European Union, Russia and China as well as, increasingly, with Israel in recent years. Born in Belgrade in 1970, the nearly 2-metre-tall (6.5ft-tall) Vucic graduated from the University of Belgrade’s faculty of law. He entered politics in 1993, joining the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party led by Vojislav Seselj.
His political record during the 1990s was marked by nationalist rhetoric. One of his most remembered statements came in Serbia’s parliament in July 1995, nine days after the Srebrenica genocide: “Kill one Serb, and we will kill 100 Muslims.” Vucic made the comments during a debate on possible NATO strikes against positions held by the Army of Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Vucic’s political mentor at the time, Seselj, was sentenced in 2018 to 10 years in prison by the Appeals Chamber of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals for persecution, deportation and forcible transfer of non-Serbs during the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s.
Aleksandar Seselj, the son of Vojislav Seselj, was on Vucic’s electoral list in Sunday’s elections. After a split within the Serbian Radical Party, Vucic and Tomislav Nikolic founded the SNS in 2008. The new party sought to move closer to mainstream European politics.
Safeta Bisevac, a Serbian journalist who has long followed Vucic’s political career, believes he was initially less popular than Nikolic, who appeared closer to common citizens. In 2012, the SNS came to power promising to fight corruption, organised crime and abuses committed under previous governments. One of the most prominent cases was the December 2012 arrest of businessman Miroslav Miskovic and his son Marko on suspicion of financial irregularities and tax evasion.
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