About 150,000 Rally in Belgrade Behind Student Movement Ahead of Serbia's Pivotal Election
About 150,000 supporters of Serbia's opposition student movement rallied in central Belgrade on Thursday, just days ahead of Sunday's crunch parliamentary elections, seeking to oust the party of veteran leader Aleksandar Vucic.
The Student List, a leaderless movement of student-backed candidates, wants Sunday's vote to end more than 14 years of rule by Vucic's rightwing populist Serbian Progressive Party (SNS).
Civil society groups have said the campaign has been marred by intimidation, arrests and misuse of public resources, and those complaints were repeated throughout Thursday's rally.
Marija Nedeljkovic Radic, 47, who came to support the Student List, said young people had finally given her hope that it is possible to live in a normal country, adding that for the first time in her life she believed that was possible.
Sunday's vote comes after nearly two years of student-led protests sparked by the 2024 collapse of a canopy at the newly renovated Novi Sad railway station, which killed 16 people.
The tragedy, widely blamed on corruption, triggered some of Serbia's largest protests since the fall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
The anti-corruption movement began with demands for a transparent investigation into the tragedy and snowballed into calls for an early election, spreading across the country and eventually forcing the government towards a snap vote.
Waving 'Students are winning' flags, chanting and blowing whistles, students and their supporters marched through Belgrade before converging on Slavija Square, the site of some of the movement's biggest protests.
The Archive of Public Gatherings, an independent crowd-size monitoring group, estimated about 150,000 people at the rally. University professor Jugoslav Gasic, one of 250 candidates on the Student List, told the crowd they were putting an end to 14 years of humiliation, chaos and betrayal, as the crowd chanted 'Victory, victory'. He said people deserved better and that the students were winning.
Vucic has dominated Serbian politics for more than a decade, serving as either prime minister or president. Amid mounting pressure, he announced the snap vote last month, setting up his biggest electoral challenge since his party took power in 2012.
Addressing supporters at a sports hall in the capital on Thursday, Vucic repeated his regular accusation that the student movement is a foreign-funded coup attempt. He told supporters never to forget how opponents tried to bring down the state, to always protect and defend it, and to go out and defeat them decisively, as white ticker tape and balloons showered the crowd.
Many of the Student List's 250 candidates for the 250-seat parliament are drawn from academia or are deliberate political outsiders. The movement has a broad platform, but at its core is a pledge to fight corruption.
Serbia lacks reliable independent polling, and the surveys that exist have produced widely differing results, leaving the outcome of Sunday's vote genuinely uncertain.
Days before the vote, Serbian civil society groups warned that conditions for 'free and fair elections' were lacking. On Wednesday, Belgrade prosecutors questioned six people arrested on suspicion of plotting 'violence, riots and attacks' on election day.
Reports of threats and intimidation targeting student demonstrators have grown in recent months, but their rallies have remained largely peaceful since they began. Igor, a 35-year-old attender, said he had followed the fight from the very beginning, that this was the last rally, and that it was important to send a message of love and peace and to see each other at the polling stations on the 25th.
Sunday's vote is therefore more than a parliamentary election: it will show whether a two-year anti-corruption movement born on the streets can change who holds power through the ballot box.
