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From the Streets to the Ballot: Serbia's Students Bet a Programme Can Beat a Name

11 minutes ago
8 min read

By Tamara Ristić 


Serbia's student movement shows how quickly networked protest can mobilise a society. Its entry into electoral politics asks a harder question: can a movement without a leader defeat a regime defined by one? 




In the age of social media, summoning a crowd of thousands takes hours rather than months. It is much harder to turn those crowds into political change. Is fast, leaderless mobilisation the reason why? And if so, have Serbia's students found a way around it? 



The paradox of speed 

Mass protest has never been easier to start. Where organisers once needed weeks of leaflets and phone calls, a single post on social media can now fill a city square before nightfall. The political scientist Larry Diamond called this “liberation technology”: digital tools that let citizens organise outside the slow  machinery of parties, unions and formal institutions. The last fifteen years seem to confirm his point. Tahrir Square in 2011, Gezi Park in 2013, Hong Kong in 2019. Each drew enormous crowds at great speed, and most had no single leader. 


Few of them, however, turned those crowds into lasting political change. The sociologist Zeynep Tufekci offers an explanation. Before the internet, a march of 300,000 required months of meetings, coordination  and printed material. That slow, laborious process built the capacities a movement would need later, namely trust among participants, mechanisms for collective decision making, and people able to negotiate on its behalf. Digital tools allow movements to bypass that stage entirely. Such movements expand rapidly but lack the organisational capacity to deliberate, compromise or adapt their strategy. Tufekci terms this condition "tactical freeze": the movement can repeatedly mobilise its supporters, yet remains unable to shift tactics when circumstances demand it. 


Herein lies the central paradox of contemporary protest. The very speed that makes mobilisation possible undermines the organisational depth that political change requires. 


The same tools, the other side 

Technology does not only work for protesters. States use it too, and in Serbia there is documented  evidence that they have. In December 2024, Amnesty International reported that Serbian police and the Security Information Agency had installed a locally developed spyware tool, NoviSpy, on the phones of activists and a journalist while the devices were held during official interviews. It also documented the use of Pegasus against Serbian civil society. 


Serbian authorities have denied the allegations. Yet in September 2026, after new evidence of spyware on students' phones, the President of the Constitutional Court, Vladan Petrov, argued that those with nothing to hide have no reason to fear being listened to. The argument has a distinctly Orwellian ring. It  shifts the burden from the state, which must justify surveillance, to the citizen, who must justify their privacy. 


Raskrikavanje, a fact checking portal run by the Serbian investigative outlet KRIK, analysed the 2025 front  pages of six pro government dailies. Vučić appeared on them more than a thousand times, almost always positively and never critically in most of them. The same newspapers portrayed protesting students as terrorists, while Vučić himself described the movement as a foreign backed "colour revolution". Political  scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way describe systems of this kind as competitive authoritarianism.  Elections take place, but the playing field is tilted before a single vote is cast. 


In such a system, leaderlessness is not only a principle. It is a defence. A leader is a phone to monitor, a past to scrutinise and a face to discredit. The students offered no such target. The opposition had tried the opposite approach in 2023, turning the Serbia Against Violence protests into an electoral coalition. It won 24 percent in December, against 47 percent for Vučić's party. The students appear to have drawn  lessons from that experience. 


From assembly to apparatus 

The essential question, then, is whether the students bypassed the slow work of organisation or found a  way to accelerate it. The evidence points to the latter. 


Their answer was the plenum. Each faculty became an open assembly in which every participant held an  equal vote and spokespeople rotated, so that no individual could become the movement's face. As the  protests spread beyond the universities, citizens adopted the same model in neighbourhood assemblies known as zborovi. The plenums gave the movement what Tufekci finds missing in most networked protest: a legitimate way to decide. 


That structure allowed the movement to endure. Under its pressure, Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned in January 2025. A month later, a CRTA survey found that eight in ten citizens supported most of the students' demands. Rather than peaking and fading, the movement sustained its momentum for  almost two years. 


The clearest proof of the movement's organisational depth was how it built its electoral list. Candidates  were nominated and vetted through the plenums, and a majority of plenums could veto any candidate. In September, they used it even against Vladan Đokić, rector of the University of Belgrade, who had  defended the students throughout and was widely expected to lead the list. A figure of his stature would have given the movement a face overnight. The plenums chose to keep it faceless. On 14 September, the students submitted the list with around 70,000 signatures, nearly seven times the legal minimum. What Tufekci argues can require years of organisational work, Serbia's students appear to have built in  just two. 


An open coalition in a divided country 

Structure is one problem. Unity is another, and in Serbia it may be the harder one. 


Serbia is divided on almost every question that matters. The first is its place in the world. Polls show the country split almost evenly on EU membership, and a 2025 European Commission survey found that only 38 percent of citizens viewed the EU positively, the lowest in the Western Balkans, while Russia and China ranked highly as trusted partners. The second is Kosovo, whose status remains unresolved. The third is transitional justice: how Serbia confronts the legacy of the 1990s wars, which ended barely three decades  ago and still divides the country. The most recent example came in September, with the funeral of Ratko Mladić, the wartime commander of the Bosnian Serb army, convicted of genocide by the UN tribunal in The Hague. 


The students chose to stay silent on these questions and focus on corruption instead. The choice was  deliberate. The movement did not begin as a campaign against the regime. Its first demands, issued in late 2024, asked for functioning institutions and accountability for sixteen deaths. They did not ask for a  change of government. Corruption and accountability are among the few causes capable of uniting citizens across Serbia's political, generational and regional divides. What critics read as vagueness may instead have been a strategy of inclusion. The aim was to gather people around a shared cause first, and only then decide where to take it. The movement turned openly political only when the government failed to meet its demands. In May 2025, the students called for early elections. 


The programme the students now run on follows the same logic. Their eleven point plan centres on a special prosecutorial police, the confiscation of illegally acquired assets and transparent public procurement. These are demands for functioning institutions, not for a particular ideology. That is precisely what allows them to speak to citizens across Serbia's divides. 


But silence has a price. A movement built on what unites people must eventually answer questions that  divide them. Pro government media and political opponents now press the students on these questions. Any clear answer risks alienating part of their support. Avoiding an answer carries its own risk, since it allows others to define the movement's positions for it. 


The name of one, against the list of many  

On the other side stands the opposite model. Vučić has dominated Serbian politics as prime minister or  president since 2014. Over that time, power has become concentrated less in his party than in his person.  His decision to resign the presidency and run for prime minister reflects this. Barred from a third presidential term, he has moved his authority to another office rather than hand it to a successor. The list he leads bears his own name. 


This is precisely the contest the students have avoided for two years: one personality against another. They continue to refuse it. Srdanović presents himself as the list's ballot holder rather than its leader. When Vučić challenged him to a televised debate, he did not accept. Critics read this as evasion. Yet it is  consistent with the movement's logic from the start. A debate between two men would risk turning the election into the kind of personal duel that has long characterised Serbian politics under Vučić. The students are asking voters to choose between a person and a programme. 


The contest is also uneven. International observers have documented vote buying and pressure on public  employees in past Serbian elections. In local elections earlier this year, the election monitor CRTA  identified at least twelve fake lists linked to the ruling party, some posing as student lists to confuse voters. The polls offer little certainty. Some independent surveys have placed the students ahead, while others give Vučić's list a clear lead. 


What Serbia is testing 

Serbia's students have answered half of the question this article began with. Fast, leaderless mobilisation need not end in a tactical freeze. Through the plenums, the movement built the capacity to deliberate,  decide and organise, and it did so at the speed of the street. 


The other half remains open, and it turns on two questions. First, can a coalition built on a shared demand for accountability withstand the pressure to take sides on the country's most divisive issues, as it has withstood every other pressure since 2024? Second, can a list with no leader offer voters something more compelling than the status quo and a familiar face? The students are betting that a programme, and the credibility of a movement that spent two years insisting it did not seek political power for itself, can do  what no single opposition leader has managed in over a decade. 


Who leads you? For two years the students have answered: all of us. That answer carried them from silent  vigils to the ballot box. On 25 October, Serbia gets the chance to answer with them.




Tamara Ristić is a second-year master's student in International Governance and Diplomacy at Sciences Po Paris, specialising in human rights, and a Research Fellow at the Pupin Initiative, a think tank working on Serbia and US relations. Her research focuses on corruption, accountability and youth movements in the Western Balkans.



 
 
 

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