Serbia’s leaderless anti-corruption coalition, the Student List, defeated the group led by former president Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) by a comfortable margin in October 25 elections.
Their 53.3% of the vote should get them 141 seats in parliament, well clear of the 125 seats needed to form a majority. The SNS can be a loud but ineffectual opposition with the 103 seats netted by their 39.7% of the vote.
The result was known shortly after polls closed, with Vučić conceding defeat 90 minutes later. Once the celebrations settle down, it looks as if Serbia will manage a peaceful transfer of power to a democratically elected government.
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‘We changed the system’: how Serbian students ended Alexander Vučić’s 12 years in power
This was not inevitable. By mid-afternoon on election day, news outlets were reporting concentrations of armoured police vehicles and movements of personnel at various spots in central Belgrade.
Photos then circulated of armoured cars in front of the state presidency building, sparking concern the regime was preparing to defend by force what it could not defend with votes. But, happily, the police withdrew as soon as Vučić made his concession.
If there is a single factor that is making a peaceful transfer of power possible, it can probably be expressed in one word: turnout.
Nearly 70% of eligible voters participated in the election, exceeding the 59% turnout in the last parliamentary election in 2023. To understand why this made the difference, we need to look at the SNS’s principal electoral strategies.
The first is to manufacture votes that distort the result. The main elements of this strategy are vote buying, fraudulent registration of voters who are non-resident or dead, multiple registrations of the same voters and ballot box stuffing.
All of these were reported in the October 25 elections and in previous elections, according to the Serbian election monitoring organisation CRTA, which keeps a running report of voting conditions.
The second strategy is to redirect votes from intended to unintended targets, mostly by flooding the market. Once the student movement registered its candidate list for these elections, observers expected a raft of competing lists to be filed under similar names to confuse voters.
As it turned out, this did not happen. But there was encouragement for competing groups to register lists challenging the students both on the left and the right.
The third strategy is to suppress turnout. In these elections, vote suppression relied on manipulation of procedure, especially with regard to Serbian citizens living abroad. Over 120,000 people registered to vote abroad, more than twice the number that had registered in the 2023 elections.
Serbia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs provided ample polling places in neighbouring states, where it was expected that voters would be mostly pro-regime. This included 28 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, mainly in the territory of Republika Srpska where the ethnic Serbian population is concentrated.
However, it provided only two polling places each for Australia and Canada and four for the US. It had been anticipated that voters in these countries would mostly support the students.
Any one of these techniques, or more than one in combination, could have been enough to bring victory if the difference between the largest competing parties was small. If the students led by 5% or less, there could have been a way for Vučić to squeeze out a victory.
But these techniques were not enough to compensate for a 13% deficit, so Vučić conceded clearly and early and violence was avoided.
The future is uncertain
The students have not disclosed much about themselves, aside from the fact they are opposed to corruption. Around the time students began demanding elections in 2025, the idea was floated that they could form what they called a “nonpolitical” government with a set term of 12 or 18 months in office.
This government would have the task of creating conditions that would make free and fair elections possible, such as reforming voter lists and electoral laws and clearing out media monopolies. It would then call elections to be contested by the registered political parties.
However realistic this idea may or may not have been, it never took on the shape of a formal commitment. And by the time elections were actually declared in September 2026, it wasn’t mentioned any longer.
The students have also avoided developing an ideological profile for themselves and kept off their electoral list candidates who strongly identified with a particular political option or who could be seen as polarising.
This was useful in maintaining a broad base of popular support, but it means that important tensions within the movement have remained unresolved.
One of the visible tensions is between three clear factions within the movement. First is a radical democratic group that wants to make the return of authoritarianism impossible. Second is a procedural democratic group that wishes to end corruption and consolidate the rule of law.
And third is a so-called “national” group. Their main criticism of Vučić is that his nationalism has not been aggressive enough, in particular towards neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.
The differences between these groups have been kept quiet for the sake of defeating the regime. In government, it will not be possible to keep them from coming forward.
This will weaken the government, but strengthen Serbia’s democracy. The disagreements at stake are the fundamental divisions in Serbian society, and they can only be addressed through democratic debate.
The Student List’s candidates also lack political experience, and we do not know how they will behave once they are in positions of power. It is a truism that power corrupts, and it is also true that politicians in this part of the world encounter a large number of temptations that might corrupt them.
The last time Serbian voters removed an authoritarian regime was in 2000, when longtime leader Slobodan Milošević was overthrown. The beneficiaries of that change did not acquit themselves well, with the Democratic Opposition of Serbia coalition succumbing to a number of corruption scandals and its own failed attempt to establish a monopoly of power.
The current generation is carrying a lot of accumulated hope and frustration, and people will be watching to see whether old mistakes get repeated.
Eric Gordy receives funding from the European Research Council.