Serbia’s student movement defeats Russia-backed leader : NPR

BELGRADE, Serbia — There are no Monday morning blues in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade. Cars driving past the green-domed National Assembly sound their horns in celebration. Broadly smiling pedestrians cheer and wave a three-fingered salute in response. This has long been viewed as a nationalist gesture — but now it is the symbol of the Student List.
 
The group of candidates selected by Serbia’s long-running, youth-led protest movement was No. 3 on the ballot in Sunday’s parliamentary elections but very much top of the pile when it came to the outcome. The Student List claimed more than half the votes, pushing Serbia’s long-serving populist leader, Aleksandar Vučić, and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) into a distant second place.
 
In the park opposite the National Assembly, hundreds of volunteers are cleaning up the mess left behind by a pro-government camp that had made the area a no-go zone for most citizens.
 
“Yesterday was a big victory, so today is the smell of freedom,” says one of the volunteers, Radomir Delic, who has been painstakingly picking cigarette butts from the grass. “We are in garbage, but it’s the smell of freedom.”
 
Most of the country’s opposition parties had stood aside to allow the Student List a clear run. When Vučić conceded defeat, shortly after the polls closed, the crowds on the streets erupted in celebration. Champagne corks popped, fireworks crackled and motorbike engines revved to mosquito pitch. Since then, the revelry has barely paused.

It now seems hard to believe that with no reliable opinion polls, the result had been difficult to call before the election. The Student List was an entirely new proposition, with no hierarchy, no leader and no political experience. It was up against a wily and experienced operator in Vučić. He had served as deputy prime minister, prime minister and president since his SNS took power in 2012, but it had always been clear that he was the man in charge.

Vučić was also adept at currying international favor. He maintained Serbia’s long-standing friendship with Russia, exchanging multiple official visits with Russian President Vladimir Putin. But he also opened membership talks to join the European Union and pushed for closer relations with the United States.

The latter resulted in considerable controversy when Vučić struck a deal with President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to build a Trump International Hotel on the site of government buildings bombed by U.S. warplanes in 1999. The legal fallout led to Kushner’s withdrawal.
 
Vučić had cast himself as the strong leader who was taking Serbia forward. But that image sustained an irreparable blow in November 2024, when a concrete canopy collapsed at a recently renovated railway station in Novi Sad, killing 16 people.