All Eyes on Serbia: How a Collapsed Canopy Became a Nation's Reckoning
Written by Miloš Bulatović
On October 25, Serbian citizens will go to the polls in what may be the most consequential election since Slobodan Milošević was toppled in 2000. For the first time in the Serbian Progressive Party’s (SNS) fourteen years in power, a genuine, broad-based political movement, born of the student protests that followed the collapse of the Novi Sad railway station canopy in November 2024, has a real chance of bringing its rule to an end.
To understand why this election matters so much, one first has to understand what the movement’s core, Serbia’s university students, are trying to end.
A Decade and a Half of Quiet Capture
When Aleksandar Vučić and the SNS swept to power in 2012, Serbia was an electoral democracy moving steadily toward EU membership. That trajectory didn't survive long. After SNS's decisive 2014 election victory handed it an absolute parliamentary majority, independent democracy trackers began recording a steady decline in democratic values. The V-Dem Institute has classified Serbia as an electoral autocracy every year since 2014, a system that holds elections but strips away the conditions that make them genuinely free and fair.¹ Freedom House's Nations in Transit report went further still: in 2020, for the first time since it began tracking the region in 2003, Serbia was removed from the list of democracies altogether and reclassified as a "hybrid regime."² Behind these numbers lies not a sudden break but a slow capture of the state, in which the courts, prosecutors, regulators and public media that should have restrained the ruling party came, one by one, to serve it instead.
The mechanics of capturing the state and its institutions are anything but abstract. They show up in a captured judiciary, where courts function less as checks on power and more as instruments of it. They show up in a media landscape where national broadcasters and tabloids operate largely as extensions of the ruling party. They show up in institutions staffed less by qualified professionals than by political loyalists, and in a political economy where, as watchdog groups have repeatedly documented, public contracts and state resources flow disproportionately toward those connected to the ruling structure. Between 2012 and 2024, Serbian civil society organized wave after wave of protest against this system, and each wave crested and receded without forcing real change. The closest the opposition came to a breakthrough was in December 2023, when the Serbia Against Violence coalition won 24.32% of the popular vote, the best opposition result of the Vučić era, but still nowhere near enough for an electoral win. ³
The Canopy That Fell
On November 1, 2024, at 11:52 a.m., a newly renovated concrete canopy at Novi Sad's main railway station collapsed onto the people sheltering and walking beneath it. Fourteen people died instantly. Two more victims later succumbed to their injuries, one on November 17, 2024, and the last on March 21, 2025, bringing the final death toll to sixteen. ⁴
The station had just undergone a reconstruction led by a consortium of Chinese state-owned companies, China Railway International and China Communications Construction Company, as part of the larger Belgrade–Budapest railway project. The contract's terms were kept confidential even from Serbian journalists who requested them.⁵ The numbers that eventually surfaced told their own story: in late 2023, the estimated cost of work on the Novi Sad station itself stood at roughly €4 million. By mid-2024, Serbia's own construction minister admitted that €65 million had been spent on the station, a more than fifteen-fold increase, with no public accounting for where the difference went.⁶ It was, by any measure, an entirely familiar pattern of opacity and inflated public spending. What made it different this time was that people had died.
From Fifteen Minutes of Silence to a National Uprising
What began as grief quickly became resistance. University students in Novi Sad and Belgrade began gathering every Friday, later every day, at 11:52 a.m., the exact moment of the collapse, for fifteen, later sixteen, minutes of silence, one for each victim, blocking traffic as they stood. The government's response was telling. Rather than engage with the students' demands for accountability, officials and SNS-aligned actors treated the gatherings with open hostility. In one particularly damning episode in January 2025, a group linked to the ruling party physically attacked students, an assault serious enough that it forced then-Prime Minister Miloš Vučević to resign.⁷
From there, the movement didn't fade; it flourished. University blockades spread to high schools. Mass marches filled the streets of Belgrade, Novi Sad, Niš, Kragujevac, and reportedly over 400 other towns and municipalities nationwide. ⁸ On March 15, 2025, Belgrade saw what is widely regarded as the largest protest in modern Serbian history; independent estimates put the crowd above 300,000 people, with some counts suggesting the true figure may have climbed significantly higher still.⁹
The movement's reach extended far beyond Serbia's borders. In April 2025, eighty students cycled 1,400 kilometers from Novi Sad to Strasbourg to address the European Parliament directly.¹⁰ The following month another group ran in relay over eighteen days from Belgrade all the way to Brussels, under the banner "From My Village to Brussels," demanding that the EU apply to Serbia the values of the rule of law and anti-corruption it so readily proclaims.¹¹ These were not symbolic gestures. They were a generation of young Serbs insisting, in the most literal and exhausting way possible, that Europe actually looked at what was happening to them.
From the Streets to the Ballot
By May 2025, the students began formally demanding early parliamentary elections. Vučić resisted for well over a year. It was only in early September 2026 that he relented, announcing a snap election for October 25 and, in a move widely read as an attempt to retain power through a side door, resigned as president on September 27, 2026, with the explicit intention of becoming prime minister instead if his party wins.¹² Critics, including some European commentators, have called the maneuver "a charade”, a technical exit from one office designed to tighten, not loosen, his grip on power.¹³ Ana Brnabić, as outgoing parliamentary speaker, now serves as acting president pending a separate presidential election.
Out of this unofficial but wide student movement, the Student List (Studentska lista) emerged: a 250-candidate electoral list built over more than a year of deliberation, composed overwhelmingly of university professors, scientists, and professionals with no prior political affiliation.¹⁴ In September 2026, the movement formalized itself as a citizens' group called Student List – Students Are Winning (Studentska lista – Studenti pobeđuju), submitted to the electoral commission with nearly 70,000 signatures, almost seven times the legal threshold.¹⁵ True to the movement's insistence from the start that it was not a vehicle for personal ambition, not a single candidate on the 250-person list is a student. Students themselves don't have any political ambitions. They chose the people for the electoral list to represent them and their interests. Candidates were vetted and, crucially, could be vetoed by the student plenums themselves, and eligibility rules barred anyone who had ever belonged to SNS, held office in an opposition party, or carried a serious criminal conviction.¹⁶ The list deliberately avoided naming a single charismatic leader, choosing its candidates instead through collective, faculty-by-faculty deliberation. It is formally headed, for ballot purposes, by Ilija Srdanović, a cardiologist and professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Novi Sad.¹⁷ Among the other 249 names are university rectors and professors, a nuclear physicist, an architect, a trade union leader, a sociologist, a former central bank governor, a retired EuroLeague-winning basketball player, and ordinary professionals from mining, healthcare, and education: a cross-section of Serbian civic life that had, until two years ago, never run for office.¹⁸
On September 15, 2026, the list unveiled its platform, the "Student Plan": eleven points organized under three headings: "Serbia or the Mafia," "Knowledge is Power," and "Serbia Grows with Us." ¹⁹ At its core is a direct assault on the machinery of state capture described earlier in this piece: a vetted Special Prosecutorial Police to pursue corruption cases without political interference; a lustration law and asset-confiscation framework targeting illegally acquired wealth; full transparency of public procurement, with an audit of exactly the kind of opaque infrastructure deals that produced the Novi Sad disaster; the depoliticization of state media and the national broadcaster RTS; and an end to party-based hiring in the public sector in favor of competitive, merit-based employment. The remaining points turn to the everyday cost of democratic decay, free textbooks, capped medicine prices, a doctor guaranteed for every village, affordable housing for young families, and support for domestic farmers and entrepreneurs squeezed by import monopolies. ²⁰ What sets it apart is not so much its content as its authorship: a platform written not by party strategists but by the same plenums, forums, and open assemblies that organized the blockades themselves.
Much of the traditional opposition, recognizing both the movement's legitimacy and its own electoral limitations, chose to step aside and support the list rather than split the anti-SNS vote, a dynamic with echoes of Péter Magyar's TISZA party reshaping the political landscape in neighboring Hungary. Opposition parties withdrew and helped create the referendum atmosphere, a mechanism that in Hungary led to overthrowing Viktor Orbán from power after 16 consecutive years.
What's at Stake
It would be easy to romanticize this moment, and there is real danger in doing so uncritically. Elections are won on turnout and ground logistics, not just moral clarity, and SNS retains considerable institutional advantages: control of state media, patronage networks, and incumbency itself. But it would be just as wrong to understate what has already been achieved. A movement with no political experience, no party machine, and no media allies has pressured a president from office, toppled a prime minister, and pushed the ruling party into an election it spent nearly two years trying to avoid.
On October 25, Serbia faces a choice between the continuation of a system that has, for over a decade, been documented by every independent democracy index as sliding away from genuine self-governance, and a list of ordinary experts who, a little over a year ago, had nothing to do with politics at all.
Serbian students didn’t set out to start a revolution. They set out to stand in silence for sixteen minutes, once a day, for people who should never have died beneath a canopy their own government let fall apart. What they built instead may be the most significant democratic challenge Serbia has seen in a generation. It began with simple demands: publish the documents, name those responsible, let the courts do their work. When the institutions meant to deliver justice stayed silent, the students drew the harder conclusion that the problem was not one collapsed canopy but the system that let it fall. Their demand grew into a call for new elections and a government that answers to its citizens.
It deserves the world’s attention. Not as a curiosity from the Balkans, but as a serious case study in civic engagement: how ordinary citizens can organize, build trust across generations, and act together without waiting for permission from those in power. It carries a lesson that reaches far beyond Serbia. Young people who organize without cynicism can still change what seems unchangeable.
References:
V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2022: Autocratization Changing Nature?; Filip Milačić, "Democratic Backsliding Through Legislative Capture in Serbia," The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2024.
Freedom House, Nations in Transit reports, 2020–2024; N1 Info, "From democracy to autocracy: Serbia has been sliding all lists since 2014."
Wikipedia, "2023 Serbian parliamentary election," citing official Republic Electoral Commission results.
Wikipedia, "Novi Sad railway station canopy collapse"; Balkan Insight, "How the Novi Sad Station Disaster Changed a Serbian City," October 2025.
European Western Balkans, "No progress in multiple investigations eight months since the Novi Sad tragedy," July 2025.
Ibid.
Wikipedia, "Miloš Vučević"; "2024–present Serbian anti-corruption protests."
Wikipedia, "Serbian anti-corruption protests"; MEER, "Serbia's students are demanding change."
Wikipedia, "Next Serbian parliamentary election," citing crowd estimates from the 15 March 2025 Belgrade protest.
France 24, "Serbian protesters cycle 1,400 kilometres to seek EU support against Vucic regime," April 2025.
The New Union Post, "'EU, Where Are U?' Serbian students arrive in Brussels after ultramarathon protest," May 2025.
Reuters/U.S. News, "Serbia's President Vucic Resigns Ahead of October Parliamentary Elections," September 27, 2026; BTA, "Serbia to Hold Snap Parliamentary Elections on October 25."
Friedrich Naumann Foundation, "Serbia on the eve of a generational decision," September 2026.
The New Union Post, "Serbian students have presented their 250-member List for the parliamentary elections," September 2026.
BBC News Serbian / AP, "Serbia's protesting youth formally join race challenging Vucic before next month's election," September 14, 2026; N1, "RIK certified 69,099 valid signatures," September 15, 2026.
Mašina, "Kako se formira studentska lista?" (How is the student list formed?), August 2025.
Mašina, "Ko je Ilija Srdanović, nosilac Studentske liste?", September 14, 2026.
Mašina, "Otkriven deo kandidata sa Studentske liste," September 10, 2026; Wikipedia, "Student List."
Danas, "Predstavljen Studentski plan u 11 tačaka i tri celine," September 15, 2026.
Serbian Monitor, "Student List programme: 'Prosecutorial police, lustration, free school textbooks, cheaper medicines,'" September 2026.
