Almost two years ago, a concrete canopy at a freshly renovated railway station in Serbia’s second city of Novi Sad collapsed. The falling canopy, which the country’s protest movement has blamed on widespread corruption, killed 16 people. Now, it has brought the country’s ruling party down with it.
Serbia’s right-wing populist president Aleksandar Vucicconceded defeat in the country’s parliamentary elections on Sunday. Just who exactly he has conceded to remains harder to judge. The force that won the popular vote, and a clear majority of parliamentary seats, is not a traditional opposition party– or any kind of party at all.
Instead, the seats will be filled by candidates belonging to the Student List, a collection of little-known academics, economists, athletes, engineers, artists and activists chosen by majority vote by the nameless student assemblies that have sprung up in the universities occupied by demonstrators for almost two years. To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading.
To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. These plenums, as they are known, have served as the guiding hand of a protest movement that has brought tens of thousands of people into the streets to overturn what demonstrators described as a culture of corruption and cronyism that had taken root under 14 years of Vucic’s increasingly authoritarian rule. Now, it falls upon them to determine which of the candidates will serve as Serbia’s next prime minister and which will run the country's ministries.
London-based political scientist Branislav Radeljic said that the student assemblies had been crucial in channelling the public fury unleashed by the Novi Sad collapse. This created a sense of shared ownership and legitimacy, while requiring activists to justify proposals to their peers rather than defer to a single leader.” You don’t have to go all the way back to the Petrograd Soviet to find precedents. Nebojsa Vladisavljevic, a professor in Serbian politics at the University of Belgrade, said that these experiments in direct democracy had been a staple of student protest movements across the Balkans for years.
Students have served as the vanguard of Serbia’s protest movement since November 2024, when suspected ruling party supporters set upon a silent vigil organised by students and teachers at Belgrade’s Faculty of Dramatic Arts. The students swiftly occupied the building, setting off a wave of university blockades that shut down classes across the country. Every student has the right to participate in plenary sessions.
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