Serbia has been in a state of widespread social unrest since 1 November of last year, when the canopy of a newly renovated train station in Novi Sad collapsed, killing 16 people. The public response to this tragedy was immediate and overwhelming. Protests spread quickly, even to places where demonstrations had not occurred for decades. Students occupied universities throughout the country and issued relatively simple and essentially common-sense demands, including full transparency regarding the contracts for the renovation of the station.
Vladimir Simović is a political activist and Labour Rights Programme Coordinator at the Belgrade-based Centre for the Politics of Emancipation, a partner organization of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Southeast Europe Office.
Students soon became the backbone of a broader social movement. At the time, few could have predicted that they would become one of the most trusted political actors in Serbia, especially given their early insistence that their struggle had nothing to do with politics in the conventional sense. Yet through persistence, tactical clarity, and a strong degree of self-organization, they earned broad support across society.
In recent weeks, however, parts of both the domestic and international public have accused the movement of drifting towards nationalism. To understand how we arrived at this point and what the movement actually represents, it is worth stepping back to examine its origins.
Filling the Political Vacuum
Part of the trust students earned from broader segments of society stems from the fact that they emerged as a social force precisely when the regime had managed to sideline nearly every other group capable of posing a challenge — most notably, the political parties of the opposition.
Many political parties in Serbia have gradually devolved into narrow circles, often lacking credibility or organizational depth. Their activist base has withered, along with their capacity to mobilize. Fragmentation has been constant, driven less by ideological differences than personal rivalries and petty factional interests. Some leaders treat their parties like private property, remaining in control despite consistently poor electoral performance. The result is a set of uninspiring outfits that fail to galvanize wider support. Moreover, there have been notable instances of parties or politicians claiming to oppose the regime, only to later join the government or publicly defend the ruling party. This has further eroded public trust, reinforcing the perception that all parties can be bought.
That said, the state of the opposition parties is not exclusively the fault of the parties themselves. The regime of President Aleksandar Vučić and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) has effectively colonized the public sphere. All TV stations with national reach — still the primary source of information for most people in Serbia — have been brought into line with the government. Opposition parties are regularly targeted on these platforms, often through direct and at times brutal defamation campaigns. Meanwhile, Vučić dominates airtime: in just the first 90 days of this year, he appeared on national TV a staggering 141 times in direct addresses or live segments. In general, the ruling majority receives 90 percent of primetime news coverage, while opposition parties receive only 10 percent — and appear as direct speakers, rather than being spoken about by others, in just 1 percent of total airtime.
While the students’ actions were deeply political and focused on building solidarity across various social groups, their broad ideological stance ultimately aligned them with centrist political narratives rooted in the principles of liberal democracy and meritocracy.
Simultaneously, Serbia’s few independent media outlets have been publicly labelled “terrorists” by the president himself. This is only the latest in a long pattern of harassment. Civil society organizations have long been dismissed as “foreign agents”, a smear that discredits their work by framing it as externally orchestrated rather than in the public interest.
To fully grasp the extent of the regime’s grip on power, one must also consider the role of economic pressure. Public funds are systematically used to reinforce the ruling party’s political dominance and cultivate a new capitalist elite whose rise depends on privileged access to state contracts and publicly funded projects. In 2024 alone, companies owned by just ten businessmen closely tied to the regime generated over 1 billion euro in revenue.
On the other side of that equation, public sector workers face relentless coercion under threat of losing their jobs — from being required to attend SNS rallies and vote for the ruling bloc, to being tasked with securing a quota of loyal voters from among their colleagues, friends, or family. At the same time, serious allegations have emerged linking the highest levels of government to organized crime. In recent years, both the police and judicial systems have come under heavy suspicion: prosecutors who pursued corruption investigations were removed from office, while police inspectors who uncovered ties between drug cartels and top government officials were themselves prosecuted — by the state — rather than protected.
Building the Movement
In this repressive environment, students emerged as one of the few social actors capable of initiating and leading a broad-based rebellion. Three defining features of the movement stand out, the first being its commitment to direct democracy. Students organize through plenums — assemblies held at each faculty, where any student can attend, propose, debate, and vote on collective decisions. In March 2025, students extended an open invitation to the wider public to adopt the same model through local assemblies (zborovi).
Assemblies are a legal mechanism for direct civic participation at the local level, enshrined in Serbia’s Law on Local Self-Government. They spread rapidly across the country. In many places, these assemblies became permanent forums. People began gathering regularly, discussing local problems, and organizing collective action. Students supported the process by sharing logistical resources and experience.
The second key feature of the student movement is its active effort to connect with other segments of society. Early on, students built ties with teachers, farmers, and lawyers. Over time, they sought ways to engage the broader working class — including repeated public calls for workers to organize a general strike. However, the right to strike in Serbia has been systematically eroded. Current Law on Strikes, in force since 1996, imposes legal and procedural barriers that make implementing a general strike practically impossible.
In response, students helped establish another important node of resistance. In late March, five of Serbia’s largest trade union federations signed a joint agreement with the student movement to push for reforms of labour legislation, namely the Labour Law and the Law on Strike. Together, students and unions organized what was likely the largest May Day protest in Serbian history, a rally drawing nearly 20,000 people.
In general, students have proven capable of mobilizing some of the largest political gatherings the country has seen. Even more significant has been their method: students have quite literally walked across Serbia — through towns and villages — meeting people face-to-face. Many of these communities had not seen a politician in decades, if ever. This direct outreach mattered. It disrupted the monopoly of regime-controlled media to define the narrative and allowed people to hear the movement’s message without filter.
The third defining aspect of the student movement is its political heterogeneity. The movement is ideologically pluralistic, yet mature enough to recognize that foregrounding internal differences at this stage would only weaken its cohesion. For months, students insisted their demands were not anti-government — they merely demanded that institutions do their job and tackle systemic corruption. It was not until nearly six months into the protests that they called for snap parliamentary elections, stating plainly that their core demands would never be met under the current administration.
While the students’ actions were deeply political and focused on building solidarity across various social groups, their broad ideological stance ultimately aligned them with centrist political narratives rooted in the principles of liberal democracy and meritocracy. This became especially evident with the adoption of the Student Edict in March 2025. The document envisions a system “based on effort and knowledge”, “a country of free people” where “universities must be independent centres of excellence” and where “experts are not devalued”. Beyond that, the rule of law is a central theme in the Edict and a constant in the movement’s message.
East or West?
The student movement is shaped not only by domestic struggles but also by Serbia’s complex geopolitical positioning. Vučić has consistently tried to frame the protests as a “colour revolution” — a foreign-backed coup attempt. The problem, however, is that there are not many plausible “foreign enemies” left to blame. His government maintains close, pragmatic ties with all major global powers, which in return expressed open support to the regime during the recent wave of protests.
The EU remains a key ally, turning a blind eye to democratic backsliding in exchange for cooperation on Kosovo and access to lithium. Meanwhile, corruption and arms deals flow across borders from Washington and Paris to Moscow and Beijing. The Serbian regime’s foreign policy is highly opportunistic, refusing to sanction Russia while simultaneously exporting weapons to Ukraine and Israel. This approach extends to its opaque infrastructure deals with China, its purchase of 2.7 billion euro worth of warplanes from France, and its plans to allow the Trump family to turn a historically significant military building bombed by NATO into a luxury hotel complex.
Since the protests in late June, it has become clear that the central thrust of the movement lies in collective resistance to repression, mutual care, and a shared rejection of authoritarian rule.
For all their ideological differences, the world’s major powers seem to agree on one thing: Serbia is a reliable, politically obedient periphery offering lucrative possibilities, cheap labour, and raw materials. The student movement thus stands alone. Its resilience lies in its internal pluralism, which has enabled it to reflect the broader society in all its conflicting political tendencies, and to resist easy ideological labelling or co-optation.
The movement has notably reclaimed the Serbian flag from the ruling party, which long used it to equate its policies with the national interest. Yet the protests’ visuals are layered: alongside national flags, one also finds banners featuring Kosovo or depictions of Jesus — also used by Russian soldiers in Ukraine — creating a visual ambiguity that has fuelled external criticism and misinterpretation. While sporadically accused of being pro-Russian due to these visual elements, in practice the students have actively reached out to the other geopolitical side. They cycled to Strasbourg and marched to Brussels to raise awareness and call for institutional support from European institutions — efforts that were both symbolic and strategic.
The regime, meanwhile, has skilfully exploited the pluralism of the movement to offer contradictory and tailored narratives to its international sponsors, portraying the protests alternately as a Russian plot or a Western-backed uprising, depending on the audience. This dual narrative, with one side blaming Russia and the other framing the protests as a Western-backed coup, serves to obscure the movement’s legitimate demands.
More Than a Flag
In recent weeks, the movement has been accused of accommodating or even drifting towards Serbian nationalism. These criticisms refer to a mass protest organized on 28 June by students after the government ignored the demand for snap parliamentary elections. The tone of the speeches held on that day stood apart from the months leading up to it. In part, this shift can be traced to the symbolism of the date itself — Vidovdan, a national and religious holiday deeply embedded in Serbia’s national mythmaking. It commemorates the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 between Serbia and the Ottoman Empire, traditionally viewed as a noble act of resistance against a more powerful enemy.
The rally was opened by a student who praised Vidovdan as a symbol of the “eternal struggle for freedom”, declaring the student movement “patriotic” in its fight against a regime that “does not serve the people”. The style of his speech was markedly conservative, especially given that he concluded by quoting Nikolaj Velimirović, a theologian and priest from the first half of the twentieth century popular on the contemporary Serbian right.
Kosovo was also invoked in several speeches, a theme amplified by the symbolism of Vidovdan. One speaker was Momčilo Trajković, a veteran political figure from Kosovo. “The government accuses students of ignoring Kosovo”, he said, calling this tactic a form of “Kosovo blackmail”. He urged that the issue “must never again be exploited to block democratic processes or preserve power”.
The most controversial speaker was Milo Lompar, a professor at the University of Belgrade known for his conservative and strongly nationalist views. Lompar spoke of “internal freedom”, which he defined as civic responsibility, religious tolerance, solidarity, and respect for the law and the constitution, emphasizing that “Kosovo and Metohija are defined in the Serbian Constitution as an inalienable part of the country”. He then spoke of “external freedom” — referring to Serbia’s sovereignty, but also to the freedom of ethnic Serbs living outside its borders. He called this vision “Serbian integralism”, a term that many immediately associated with the nationalist ideology of Vojislav Šešelj — and, by extension, his political heir, Aleksandar Vučić.
Still, to claim that the movement has been overtaken by nationalists is to overlook everything that has happened in the preceding months. Often based on selective readings of a few speakers rather than the movement as a whole, this focus on nationalism obscures what may in fact be a shift to the left. Earlier movement documents, such as the Student Edict, emphasized the rule of law and meritocracy. Recent developments, however, suggest a shift towards a more explicitly social position, addressing the economic foundations of the current system.
One of the student speakers on 28 June introduced a new platform, the Social Agreement, denouncing not cultural enemies, but the erosion of Serbia’s public institutions, the decimation of domestic industry, and the state’s complicity in deepening inequality. Corruption, she argued, was not an accident — it was “the organizing logic of a regime” that has hollowed out the state in service of private gain.
In a speech signalling a shift from centrist rhetoric towards a more socially grounded stance, she called on workers, the unemployed, and the neglected rural poor to join the struggle to “reclaim what once belonged to the public”. This was no appeal to ethnic identity — it was a straightforward protest against deepening social and economic exclusion. What began with four pragmatic demands has grown into a broader refusal: a declaration that the current regime is illegitimate not only because it violates democratic norms, but because it has abandoned its people.
What is emerging in Serbia is not a narrow, ethnocentric mobilization, but something far more ambitious and harder to define: a pluralistic uprising rooted in direct democracy.
Moreover, the movement stands in opposition to a regime saturated with nationalist figures, rhetoric, and practices. It is the ruling elite that provides the most explicit and sustained expression of nationalism — and the institutional power to act on it. Perhaps no moment captures this better than the rise of student organizing in Novi Pazar, a city in southern Serbia with a majority Bosniak population that has long been pushed to the periphery of national attention. Until recently, few outside the region knew much about the public university there. But that changed when students from Novi Pazar became active participants in the protests, carrying banners reading “There's no ‘yours’ and ‘ours’ here.”
Students from Novi Pazar described, often emotionally, how for the first time they felt “placed on the map” of Serbia. As they marched across the country, from town to town, they were welcomed with open arms. “These were villages and hamlets, people who aren’t from the city, who don’t even use social media, yet they knew the people from Novi Pazar were coming, that Bosniaks, Muslims, were arriving, and that food needed to be adjusted”, one student recounted.
That spirit of mutual recognition deepened during the Easter holidays, when students from Novi Pazar travelled to Belgrade to maintain the protest blockade in front of the Radio Television of Serbia building, allowing their Orthodox colleagues to return home to be with their families. During that time, a war veteran addressed the crowd, condemning the role of the state media in spreading hate and propaganda during the 1990s and again today. Speaking of the student movement as the only force reviving hope, he turned to the families of the Novi Pazar students: “I want to tell the parents of these children not to worry, that there are no longer ‘our’ children and ‘your’ children; they are all our children.”
Democracy Is Messy
What is emerging in Serbia is not a narrow, ethnocentric mobilization, but something far more ambitious and harder to define: a pluralistic uprising rooted in direct democracy. This movement challenges not only the ruling regime but also the deeply entrenched narratives that aim to divide those who seek change. From its very beginning, it has forged meaningful alliances across social groups — workers, farmers, teachers, artists, lawyers — while standing in solidarity with environmental struggles and communities resisting extractivist megaprojects like the proposed lithium mine in the Jadar River Valley.
Since the protests in late June, it has become clear that the central thrust of the movement lies in collective resistance to repression, mutual care, and a shared rejection of authoritarian rule. It marks the fragile but determined rise of a new political subject, grounded in the practice of solidarity rather than coherent ideology, and in shared struggle rather than inherited divisions. It will not immediately resolve all the deep-rooted problems that have accumulated over decades, but it can lay the groundwork for Serbian society to begin moving in that direction.
Precisely because of this reality, the movement remains an open and contested political space — one that should not be abandoned, but actively shaped. The task ahead is to organize and fight for a political articulation that places democracy, equality, and social justice at the centre of its struggle.