Serbia Ejects Vučić; Students Must Now Govern

Serbia awoke on Monday to a new era after a student-backed protest movement won 52.7% of the vote and 139 of 250 parliamentary seats, ending Aleksandar Vučić’s 14 years in power — and leaving the country without a known prime minister or a clear governing programme.

For fourteen years, Serbia had one answer to every political question. On Monday it had a question instead of an answer — and that is the more interesting outcome.

The result is a landslide by any measure used in Central Europe. With almost 99% counted, the State Election Commission put the student-backed list on 52.7% and Aleksandar Vučić’s SNS-led alliance on 39.2%, giving the movement 139 seats in the 250-seat National Assembly against the SNS’s 97, with 14 seats left to minority parties.

Turnout was reported as the highest in Serbia’s recent history across a contest between 18 lists and more than 2,400 candidates. Vučić conceded late on Sunday, and by Monday morning tens of thousands had filled the streets of Belgrade and towns across the country, ending a protest cycle that had run, on and off, for nearly two years.

The provenance of the win matters to what comes next. The movement crystallised after the collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad in November 2024, which killed 16 people — a disaster that students read as proof of a state that had traded competence for patronage.

Their list is deliberately un-political in the traditional sense, filled with university professors, actors and farmers. Its most recognisable names are the list head, cardiologist Ilija Srdanović, former central bank governor Dejan Šoškić, and Belgrade University professor Radomir Sajković, who spoke for the students after victory. What it does not have is a leader, a named prime minister, or a disclosed slate for the security, justice and interior ministries.

That is where the comparison every outlet is reaching for becomes instructive rather than decorative. Hungary’s Péter Magyar beat Viktor Orbán on 12 April and his Tisza party took a two-thirds majority — the arithmetic that allows a government to rewrite constitutional rules and staff institutions without opposition consent. Serbia’s students took 55.6%. Enough to form a government and pass ordinary legislation; almost certainly not enough to remake the constitution, and therefore dependent on opposition votes for the deeper structural reform their voters voted for. A movement that campaigned against party politics now needs parties.

Two further risks sit on the record. International monitors, including the European Union, raised concerns about the fairness and safety of the campaign before Sunday’s vote. And Vučić, who has repeatedly denied accusations of repression and corruption and is a self-declared supporter of US President Donald Trump, used his concession to allege that foreign interference — specifically an “American deep state” — brought about his defeat. That is a familiar architecture for contesting a result that the numbers cannot support, and Serbia has lived through what happens when a losing side declines to accept a count.

The human register is where the story really sits. “I thought it was unbelievable, I still do not believe it. It was too long,” said university administrator Marijana Radovanović Pajović. Svetlana Karagkozidou, 60, an insurance worker, spoke of “this corruption that has entered into all pores of our lives” and the hope of “a normal community.” Senka Radaković, also 60, was not celebrating: “Changing the country like that so suddenly and all at once, I don’t like it. I don’t even know who is standing behind, who those people are, who will be leading the country.”

Serbia’s voters have settled who should not govern. Whether a leaderless movement can govern — and what its 55.6% actually permits it to do — will be answered not in the streets, but in the next few weeks, by names nobody has yet chosen.