In November 2024, 15 people lost their lives when a newly renovated concrete canopy outside the central railway station in Serbia’s second city, Novi Sad, suddenly collapsed. Before long, national mourning snowballed into public outrage as people blamed a mix of shoddy construction work and government corruption for the deadly disaster.
Since then, the country has been swept by mass protests—even greater than the ones that resulted in the fall of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic 25 years ago. Demonstrations continue to this day, with the protesters adapting their tactics to keep the public engaged: Last weekend, demonstrators from across Serbia descended upon the country’s third-biggest city, Nis, to stage an 18-hour rally in the center of town, and organizers are planning their biggest demonstration to date in the capital, Belgrade, on March 15.
These aren’t the first sustained mass demonstrations that President Aleksandar Vucic’s government has faced since his party came to power in 2012. Indeed, protests lasting many weeks or months have flared up at least once a year since 2018. However, unlike previous demonstrations that centered around more academic issues—such as democratic backsliding, judicial independence, and press freedom—the current focus on state corruption has appealed to a broader cross-section of society—in part because it is a tangible issue and can’t be dismissed as a bourgeois concern.
Plus, rather than being coordinated by opposition parties, these protests have largely been led by students, primarily from the University of Belgrade. These student activists have blockaded faculty buildings across the capital since mid-November and organized huge demonstrations, the largest of which have drawn crowds of around 100,000 people onto the streets.
More than four months in, the government still hasn’t found an effective way to quell public anger. First, it attempted to deny any responsibility for the tragedy in Novi Sad, claiming that the outdoor canopy wasn’t part of a government reconstruction project for the station.
However, this was contradicted by Zoran Djajic, a civil engineer who worked as a consultant on the railway station’s renovation. In a TV interview just days after the incident with N1, Serbia’s main opposition news outlet, Djajic revealed that the canopy, which he said was part of the government reconstruction project, had failed to pass crucial safety checks and had serious defects.
Despite submitting a written warning to the relevant authorities—and flagging the need to reinspect the canopy—Djajic said he never received a reply.
The following day—Nov. 4—Djajic’s revelations forced the resignation of Infrastructure Minister Goran Vesic, who is one of the most prominent figures in Vucic’s party. In January, continued demonstrations also provoked the resignation of Prime Minister Milos Vucevic, who was the mayor of Novi Sad during much of the railway station’s renovation.
Yet, this has had little effect on the protesters, who say that it’s the entire system that needs changing from top to bottom. They have set out four key demands that the government must meet if they want the blockades to end: the release of documents relating to the railway station disaster; the prosecution of those who are suspected to have assaulted protesters (some of whom N1 has alleged to have ties to members of the ruling party, such as Vucevic, the former mayor); the dropping of charges brought against students and university professors during the protests; and a 20 percent increase in the state’s higher education budget. To date, none of these demands have been met.
On March 4, the situation escalated politically when chaos broke out in Serbia’s National Assembly. Members of one of the opposition parties, the Green-Left Front, set off smoke bombs after the ruling coalition rebuffed their attempts to stage a parliamentary vote on whether to fulfill some of the students’ demands.
Throughout all of this, the government has struggled to find ways to contain the growing storm. The ruling party’s usual methods—bullying its opponents into submission through smears and character assassinations carried out by tabloid media—aren’t well suited to this situation. This is because the student movement is leaderless and makes its decisions in committee meetings where each participant gets a vote. Demonstrators may rely on the support and advice of university staff, but there are no standout figures whom the media can try to drag through the mud.
The fact that the protests are student-led has also garnered a unique resonance with the public. Most of the college students involved weren’t even born yet when Milosevic’s regime fell in 2000, and they represent a clean break from the political disillusionment that has haunted the country for nearly 25 years. These factors have made the protests both broadly appealing and remarkably durable.
But with time, the movement’s lack of hierarchy could also end up being its fatal flaw.
Although a horizontal, leaderless structure, reminiscent of the Occupy movement that began with protests in New York City’s Wall Street in 2011, has proven to be an advantage to the students thus far, history has shown that political organizations of this nature are far more prone to infighting—and tend to fail. Though the students have been creative in their methods while organizing, they have also shown a glaring lack of political nous.
When Vucic offered to meet with university officials to try to negotiate an end to the ongoing blockade in late January, his offer of direct dialogue was swiftly rebuffed by students from the faculty of law. Citing the Serbian Constitution, they claimed that the office of the president was not the relevant authority to carry out such negotiations because the presidency is a largely ceremonial role.
Though theoretically correct, it’s well known that, in reality, Vucic is the one who calls the shots. Leaning on the constitution in a sham democracy with weak institutions is a debate club argument that does nothing to advance the protest’s aims in a practical way.
Furthermore, the law students argued that university officials are not in a position to negotiate with Vucic because it is the student body that issued a list of demands that the government must fulfill if it wants the protests to end. Holding such a firm line makes sense, particularly when faced with the prospect of negotiating with a strongman such as Vucic, but time is running out. The longer that the protests go on, the more difficult it will be for their organizers to keep the momentum going. The masses will inevitably grow disheartened if they start to feel that they’re not getting anywhere, and numbers will begin to plummet at some point.
The students have also ruled out standing for elections, whether as candidates for existing parties or new ones. But the reality is that the ballot box is the only mechanism that they have to oust Vucic and implement a new regime to carry out the systemic change that they and their supporters demand.
Their only other hope is that the international community decides to put pressure on Vucic’s government, but this isn’t realistic either: Plans are already underway to build a “Trump Tower” luxury hotel in the middle of Belgrade. This will surely buy Vucic huge credit with the U.S. administration, which is already showing a far more positive attitude toward Serbia than neighboring Kosovo.
The European Union, on the other hand, has consistently shown that it is prepared to overlook issues such as corruption in the pursuit of its top geostrategic aim in the Balkans, which is the normalization of ties between Serbia and Kosovo. So, all things considered, the students will probably be forced to change course or watch their movement slowly disintegrate.
But that’s not to say that the Serbian president isn’t under any pressure. For several months now, there have been indications of growing divisions inside of Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party; different factions within the party seem to be at odds with one another as they compete for influence. The longer that the demonstrations go on, the more likely it becomes that more heads will roll.
The state broadcaster, Radio Television of Serbia, has also shown an unusual degree of independence in recent weeks by reporting on the protests in a balanced way. This has been interpreted as an act of defiance against the government and a sign of cracks forming in the system. This should be very worrying for the ruling party, which—having dominated national politics since 2012—might be approaching its limit.
On the streets of Belgrade, meanwhile, realism is in short supply, and a number of idealistic protesters whom I’ve spoken to seem convinced that Vucic has entered his endgame. But nobody is able to answer how this will happen, nor whether they have any sort of plan for the day after.
This is a recipe for disappointment. When the Arab Spring deposed Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011, it was the Muslim Brotherhood that stepped in to fill the political vacuum that remained because they were the most organized alternative, rather than the one that fit best with the aims of the revolution.
Thus, even if Serbia’s students do somehow succeed in ousting Vucic, this could easily open a path for an even more illiberal figure to take his place. As in Egypt’s case, any change could end up being short-lived, merely opening an interregnum that is eventually filled by a new Vucic, just as Mubarak’s authoritarian rule was ultimately swapped for autocracy under Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
The protests might be student-led, but a significant number of attendees come from the nationalist right. The use of anti-Western and pro-Russian flags in the demonstrations is widespread; meanwhile, protesters carrying EU flags have been forcefully stripped of them by groups of burly young men who have become a constant feature of these demonstrations. In the unlikely event of Vucic’s ouster, the ensuing political void is far more likely to be filled by this strand of public opinion than the one propagated by local nongovernmental organizations.
Though it remains unclear who exactly would take the lead—Vucic’s party is the only real organized political force in Serbia—in a country where public opinion leans firmly to the right, patriotic arguments carry far more weight than ones about transparency and independent institutions.
Thus, Vucic is likely to outlast these protests, because even if many Serbs don’t like him, they don’t see any viable political alternatives. Recent polling conducted by the Serbia-based Center for Research, Transparency, and Accountability found that only 27 percent of the respondents said they trusted Vucic, and that 52 percent said they would vote against him in a referendum.
But as troubling as this might look for the president, it’s far easier to rally the anti-Vucic vote than it is unite Serbia’s fractured electorate around a potential replacement.
Instead of dreaming of revolution, the students need to come to terms with the fact that, like Milosevic, Vucic can only be removed through the ballot box. The true measure of their success will be in their ability to build a lasting movement that can channel anti-government anger until a political alternative to Vucic emerges.