Serbia Election Hands Students Historic Parliament Win

Aleksandar Vucic has conceded defeat in the Serbia election, after a student-led movement won a parliamentary majority in Sunday's snap vote and ended more than a decade of dominance by his Serbian Progressive Party. Vucic told supporters at his party's election night event in Belgrade that it was clear his coalition had lost, saying: "The Student List has won." The result is a seismic shift for a Balkan country where Vucic had held virtually absolute control, backed by President Vladimir Putin, while denouncing the student movement as a foreign-led attempt to unseat him.

According to a projection by CeSID and Ipsos, the Student List won about 52 percent of the vote and 140 seats in the 250-seat National Assembly, while the Vucic-led United Serbia list won 39 percent and 103 seats. A parliamentary majority requires 126 seats, so the Student List can form a government without relying on other parties if the projections are confirmed. Besides national minority lists, no other list crossed the electoral threshold. Turnout stood at around 70 percent, substantially higher than in the 2023 election.

From street protests to parliament

The movement's rise began in the streets rather than on the campaign trail. Huge protests erupted after the collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad in November 2024 killed 16 people. Public anger over alleged corruption widened into a broader demand for accountability, and the student-led network turned that anger into an organised electoral challenge. Under Serbia's proportional representation system, students and civil society leaders who had led the protests united with university professors and cultural figures to create a joint list for the election.

Vucic called the early election after two years of protests, dissolving the National Assembly on September 9. The vote had originally been due by December 2027. Before polling day, a survey published on Thursday had put Vucic's party at 47 percent and the student movement at 40 percent, according to Sky News, so the scale of the student victory surprised many observers. Serbia's 6.4 million voters cast ballots for lawmakers to parliament in a contest widely framed as a test of whether the students could unseat Vucic.

At the Student List headquarters, Radomir Sajic, a candidate for the list, told supporters that preliminary results put students ahead at nearly all polling stations. "Students have won," he said, according to AFP, adding that hope for a Serbia of fairness, freedom and dignity had triumphed. Celebrations spilled into the streets of Belgrade, where supporters revived chants from the student uprising that helped bring down Slobodan Milošević in 2000, including the old cry of "He's finished!"

What comes next for Serbia

Cardiologist Ilija Srdanović leads the Student List, though the movement has stressed its decentralised character. Its platform has centred on institutional reform, accountability and a break with the political habits that defined the Vucic era. The victory also fits a larger pattern across Europe, where young people have mobilised over corruption, education and economic strain, and in Serbia that energy has now translated into a genuine electoral shock.

Vucic, who resigned from the presidency last month to return to the prime minister's office as the candidate of the ruling party, blamed the loss on Serbia's independent media and on alleged interference by unnamed European countries and an American deep state, without providing specific evidence. His party had governed since 2012. Reports of irregularities and violence at some polling stations, also denounced by the European Union, did not stop the student wave, according to reporting on the vote.

The result opens an uncertain chapter for a country that has spent years balancing relations with Russia and the European Union, and for a region watching whether a protest movement can govern as effectively as it campaigned. The first task for the new majority will be forming a government and turning promises of reform into law. The outcome was reported by the Associated Press and by The Brief, with background from the 2026 Serbian parliamentary election record. More world coverage appears in The World section, with related election coverage in Politics.