Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić has won every election he has contested since 2012, but on Sunday, a student-led movement stands a real chance of edging out his ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) in the country’s parliamentary elections. A poll published Tuesday by New Serbian Political Thought, an independent pollster, put the Student List narrowly ahead of the Progressive Party, at 44.5% to Vučić’s 42.7% — the first time an opposition list has led a national poll ahead of an election in over a decade. The largest protest movement in modern Serbian history began in November 2024, when a freshly renovated railway station awning collapsed in Novi Sad, killing 16 people, including two young children.
Vigils for the dead turned into mass protests, fueled by government denials of wrongdoing that forced out the previous prime minister. Demonstrations drew huge crowds, peaking with a March 2025 rally attended by more than 325,000 people in Belgrade. Student protesters have been demanding early elections ever since.
New Serbian Political Thought’s editor Đorđe Vukadinović cautioned that the polling figures released by his outlet are a snapshot, not a projection, adding that he had considered not publishing the results at all given what he called “near-hysterical” attacks and reactions from the government to its previous findings. Pro-government tabloids and senior Progressive Party figures have spent the election campaign tearing into independent pollsters, branding them “fake researchers.” But for the Student List, the polling reflects months of concerted door-to-door canvassing to reach every corner of the country, as well as something Serbia’s established opposition parties may be short of after more than a decade of fighting SNS’s omnipresence in the country: the stubborn persistence of youth. We refused to accept that this was a lost cause or accept there were pro-SNS dead zones that we didn’t reach out to,” Golubović said, explaining that the Progressive Party was the only party that previously had the capacity to mount nationwide campaigns.
Vučić, who has been in power as president or prime minister for 12 years and stood down as president to run as a prime ministerial candidate in the forthcoming elections, has also taken his campaign on the road. At times, he has driven himself to election rallies in a black Škoda while singing folk ditties, all posted on his TikTok account, where he hosts live Q&A sessions. Vučić’s penchant for gimmicky political ads has also come to the fore in the campaign.
In one, he plays a restaurant waiter taking orders from a Serbian family. The grandfather asks for no sanctions on Russia, while the others ask for new highways, higher salaries and better pensions. In another, he sits across from an empty chair bearing a photograph of the Student List’s lead candidate Ilija Srdanović and a cabbage-pickling stone, traditionally used in the Balkans to weigh down barrels full of sauerkraut in the fall — all part of his attempts to include folksy and everyman details in his campaign.
Vučić’s Progressive Party has spent 14 years as the West’s awkward but indispensable partner in the Balkans. Serbia, an EU candidate country, has refused to sanction Russia. Vučić flew to Moscow for President Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day parade last year.
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