About 150,000 supporters of Serbia’s opposition student movement rallied in central Belgrade on Thursday, seeking to oust the party of veteran leader Aleksandar Vucic in crunch parliamentary elections this weekend. The Student List, a leaderless movement of student-backed candidates, wants to end more than 14 years of rule by Vucic’s rightwing populist Serbian Progressive party (SNS) in Sunday’s vote. Civil society groups have said the campaign has been marred by intimidation, arrests and misuse of public resources.
The tragedy, widely blamed on corruption, triggered some of Serbia’s largest protests since the fall of Slobodan Milošević in 2000. The anti-corruption movement, led by university students, snowballed from demands for a transparent investigation into the tragedy into calls for an early election. Waving “Students are winning” flags, chanting and blowing whistles, students and their supporters marched through Belgrade before converging on Slavija Square, the site of some of their biggest protests.
The Archive of Public Gatherings, an independent crowd-size monitoring group, estimated about 150,000 people gathered at the rally. Students are winning!” Vucic has dominated Serbian politics for over a decade, serving as either prime minister or president. Amid mounting pressure, Vucic announced the snap vote last month, setting up his biggest electoral challenge since his party took power in 2012.
Vucic, who addressed supporters at a sports hall in the capital on Thursday, has regularly accused the student movement of being a foreign-funded coup attempt. Let us always protect and defend it,” said the 56-year-old, who resigned to run for prime minister. Defeat them decisively!” he said before white ticker tape and balloons showered the crowd.
Many of the 250 candidates of the Student List running for the 250-seat parliament are drawn from academia or are deliberate political outsiders. The movement has a broad platform, but at its core is a pledge to fight corruption. Serbia lacks reliable independent polling, and surveys have produced widely differing results.
Days before the vote, Serbian civil society groups warned that conditions for “free and fair elections” were lacking. On Wednesday, Belgrade prosecutors questioned six people arrested on suspicion of plotting “violence, riots and attacks” on election day. Reports of threats and intimidation targeting student demonstrators have grown in recent months, but their rallies have remained largely peaceful since they began.
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