Late on a Sunday evening, Serbia’s long-serving populist leader Aleksandar Vučić publicly acknowledged that his ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) had lost the country’s snap parliamentary elections, even as official final vote tallies remained pending. “We still do not have final results… it is clear that we have lost these elections,” Vučić announced from his party’s headquarters in central Belgrade, marking a stunning upset for the administration that has dominated Serbian politics for more than a decade.
The snap polls were called by Vučić himself, in the wake of two years of sustained nationwide public anger sparked by the 2024 deadly collapse of a train station canopy in the northern city of Novi Sad, an infrastructure failure that killed 16 people and became a widely recognized symbol of systemic official corruption and state negligence. Barred from running for a third presidential term after two full stints in the top office, Vučić had pivoted to lead the SNS parliamentary ticket in a bid to return to the prime minister role he vacated back in 2017.
Preliminary data released by Serbia’s national election commission confirmed a record-breaking voter turnout, with 64.9% of eligible citizens casting their ballots by 6 p.m. local time, two full hours before polling stations were scheduled to close – a surge that independent political analysts had long predicted would heavily favor the grassroots, student-led opposition movement that had mobilized widespread anti-establishment sentiment across the country.
Dubbed the Student List, the loose, decentralized protest movement with no formal, designated national leadership had no prior governing experience, but deliberately fielded a diverse slate of 250 parliamentary candidates drawn from all walks of Serbian public life, including medical doctors, actors, university academics and prominent sports figures, to represent its cross-section of anti-government supporters. As the preliminary results confirmed their historic victory, jubilant crowds flooded the streets of Belgrade, dancing, chanting “victory”, blaring car horns and setting off fireworks, with one young student telling the BBC the outcome felt like “a miracle” that meant “Serbia is free”.
The movement’s lead candidate, respected cardiologist Ilija Srdanović, told BBC Serbian in a post-result statement that the new governing bloc’s top priorities would be to “free the country from tyranny”, including a sweeping purge of officials responsible for violently suppressing peaceful anti-government protests, removing ruling party loyalists from unaccountable leadership posts in all state-owned public enterprises, and fully stripping the national public broadcaster of partisan political control. Vučić and the SNS party have consistently and repeatedly denied all allegations of systemic corruption throughout their time in power.
Throughout the election campaign, Vučić had positioned his platform on a pledge to advance Serbia’s long-running European Union membership bid while refusing to impose Western-aligned sanctions on Russia over its full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, alongside concrete promises to raise state pensions, boost public sector wages and expand funding for the country’s public healthcare system. Wild, unscripted celebrations also unfolded outside the Student List’s Belgrade headquarters, as first-time political activists and long-time anti-corruption organizers gathered to mark the end of more than a decade of SNS rule.