For nearly two years, student protesters demanded a fundamental transformation of Serbia’s political system, and the Oct. 25 elections marked an extraordinary step toward achieving it. Their movement defeated the formidable political machine of longtime leader Aleksandar Vucic in a stunning upset.

The Student List secured approximately 53 percent of the vote and 140 parliamentary seats, with a record voter turnout of nearly 70 percent. It ended 14 years of uninterrupted rule by Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), which is left with 103 seats. A new government must be formed within 90 days of the official results.

The victory is remarkable not least because the students disregarded almost every convention of electoral politics. They rejected traditional parties, eschewed recognizable leadership, and offered voters something closer to a moral crusade than a normal political program. The elections therefore functioned less as a choice between competing platforms and more as a referendum on Vucic’s years in power.

Winning power and exercising it are different things. The qualities that made the student movement effective in opposition—from the students’ status as political outsiders to their ideological heterogeneity—could become liabilities in government. Now, the Student List must prove to an expectant public that it can move beyond deliberating what needs to change and govern.

Serbia’s ongoing political upheaval traces back to November 2024, when a concrete canopy collapsed outside the newly renovated Novi Sad railway station, killing 16 people. Initial demonstrations demanded government accountability for the disaster and transparency over who was responsible for the construction and how public funds were spent.

As protests spread across Serbia, the disaster became a symbol of broader anger over endemic corruption, political patronage, and the ruling party’s stranglehold on state institutions. The movement evolved into a campaign for wholesale political change, culminating in snap parliamentary elections. Students, who carried out university occupations and demonstrations that put immense pressure on Vucic’s government, were the driving force.

The students’ grassroots efforts had structural advantages. The movement was decentralized, operating through network-based university groups that made it difficult for the government to identify leaders it could discredit or co-opt. The students also rejected Serbia’s opposition establishment, whose chronic infighting, electoral failures, and tainted reputation made it an unappealing alternative to Vucic. This helped the movement attract support from across the political spectrum.

The students initially insisted their objective was to compel Serbia’s institutions to function better rather than to enter electoral politics. But after six months of protest, they began to recognize the limitations of their approach. At the time, I argued in Foreign Policy that street demonstrations alone would not transform Serbia, and that the students would have to turn to the ballot box to achieve lasting change. In May 2025, they took that step, demanding snap elections.

Vucic resisted calls for an early vote for another 16 months before finally dissolving parliament on Sept. 9 and scheduling the October elections. He resigned as president to contest the election as the SNS candidate for prime minister, temporarily handing the position to parliamentary speaker Ana Brnabic. (Serbia must hold an early presidential election by Dec. 27.)

So, the students did enter politics—though on unique and even inadvisable terms. Rather than joining forces with established parties, they assembled the Student List, an electoral coalition that included academics, professionals, and political newcomers. Candidates were nominated and vetted by student plenums at individual university faculties, which agreed on a final list through a nationwide process of collective decision-making.

The Student List retained a horizontal structure and avoided elevating a charismatic leader, consciously rejecting the political culture that Vucic cultivated. That strategy was an enormous gamble. The students bet that public dissatisfaction was widespread enough to bring habitual nonvoters to the polls: primarily politically disengaged Serbians, first-time voters, and people who had become disillusioned with electoral politics in the Vucic era.

But they did not have an obvious plan for winning over the government’s supporters, many of whom had a material stake in Vucic’s patronage system. SNS reportedly has more than 700,000 members; party loyalty is often a prerequisite for securing public-sector employment. In smaller towns where the state is a major employer, supporting the ruling party is therefore as much a matter of economic self-preservation as political conviction.

While in power, the SNS cultivated a invested in preserving the status quo, which included public-sector employees, business owners benefiting from state contracts, and older voters who credited Vucic with rising pensions and economic stability.

Vucic campaigned on his economic record and sought to discredit the student movement, accusing its supporters of attempting a so-called color revolution and portraying their slate of inexperienced candidates as a threat. His message was familiar: The SNS delivered stability, infrastructure investment, and higher wages, pensions, and living standards. Serbia has experienced genuine economic development under Vucic, but as elsewhere, the rising cost of living has strained household finances.

By contrast, the student movement asked voters to embrace uncertainty for the promise of a better future. Its 11-point reform agenda promised to restore the rule of law and respect for the constitution, free the judiciary from political interference, confiscate illegally acquired wealth, and dismantle the patronage networks that have permeated state institutions.

The SNS campaign rested on what it thought was a straightforward calculation: Would voters risk their livelihoods on an inexperienced opposition promising to tear down the existing order? This underestimated how much public tolerance for Vucic had deteriorated. His party is plagued by allegations of corruption, cronyism, and abuses of authority; the touted stability increasingly appeared to serve a small elite.

Vucic’s government also overestimated its traditional methods of intimidation. International election observers documented voter pressure, misuse of state resources, and unequal campaign conditions. Pro-government forces dominated airtime and broadcast overwhelmingly negative coverage of the Student List, according to the European Center for Research, Transparency, and Accountability. These tactics still failed to prevent the opposition from large-scale mobilization.

Ultimately, the Student List won the public’s vote, with its perceived weaknesses serving as strengths. By rejecting the established opposition, it avoided inheriting the baggage of politicians who had repeatedly failed in challenging Vucic. Its lack of obvious ideological identity united voters with otherwise incompatible convictions, and its refusal to appoint a dominant leader deprived the government of an obvious individual to demonize.

The victory of the Student List bears comparison with that of Prime Minister Peter Magyar in neighboring Hungary’s elections in April. Both movements capitalized on exhaustion with entrenched governments that blurred the distinction between party and state and turned discontent with corruption into a broader rejection of the political order.

But there is an important difference. Magyar—a former member of longtime Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s party—offered Hungary a recognizable alternative built around his leadership, combining institutional accountability with a message about deteriorating public services and living standards. Serbia’s student movement offered something more radical: an opportunity to replace the political culture itself.

The question now is whether a movement assembled around opposition to one leader can develop the coherence necessary to govern without him. The Student List’s parliamentary majority should allow it to form a government without coalition partners. But the movement has yet to settle elementary questions of leadership, including who will become prime minister and how to reconcile ideologically diverse factions.

Ilija Srdanovic, a physician and professor who became the lead candidate on the electoral list, confirmed that government appointments will be decided collectively by lawmakers, while the student plenums that elected them intend to retain an oversight role. But this risks creating competing centers of authority—a tension that is already surfacing. The Student List lawmakers and the plenums are currently deliberating how to balance the grassroots participation that defined the movement with the elected representatives’ practical need to make decisions quickly.

The Student List also encompasses left-wing academics, liberal reformers, and conservative nationalists whose different positions on key foreign-policy issues that have long been political third rails in Serbia—such as Kosovo’s independence, support for Russia, and Serbia’s European integration—could prove especially difficult to reconcile in government.

Another immediate challenge is the presidential election that is due by the end of next month. The Student List must put forward a credible candidate while simultaneously forming a government. Defeat could leave it sharing power with a hostile president, further complicating its ambitious reform plans. The scale of the October upset makes a student victory likely, however. Those who voted for the Student List likely won’t want a president who throws sand in the gears of the parliament they mobilized to elect.

The new leadership will face enormous practical obstacles to governance. SNS loyalists remain embedded throughout the state bureaucracy, where they could obstruct reforms and frustrate corruption investigations that the new government intends to pursue. Particularly challenging will be reforming the police and intelligence services, whose senior officials have been accused of surveilling and intimidating government opponents, as well as links to organized crime.

Dismantling these networks requires more than moral conviction. It demands administrative competence, political discipline, and the ability to distinguish legitimate reform from politically motivated retribution. This last distinction is particularly important. The new government will face intense pressure to deliver accountability for years of alleged abuses, and the Student List has already called on judges and prosecutors to either pursue corruption cases or resign. But indiscriminately purging the state apparatus risks the sort of politicization that the students promised to end.

Equally, the new leadership cannot neglect Serbians’ material concerns. A government devoted to prosecuting its predecessor while failing to improve ordinary lives might find that enthusiasm for political renewal has a limited shelf life. Concerns are emerging about the Student List’s vague economic program, with economists questioning its investment plans. An approaching budget deadline will quickly test the new government’s economic credibility.

It would also be foolish to write Vucic off. The SNS retains 103 parliamentary seats, extensive patronage networks, and influence over local administrations and media outlets. Vucic has already vowed to return to power, though he must first keep his political machine intact. Vucic has been involved in national politics since 1993; he spent 12 years in opposition after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. He will not simply disappear.

Dismantling an entrenched political system is one thing, but building a functioning alternative is another. The students have won an impressive mandate, but their sweeping ambitions will take more than one parliamentary term. They must learn not only how to win elections but also how to retain voters’ confidence. That demands a transition from protest to politics, from moral absolutism to compromise, and from opposition to responsibility.

Serbia’s student movement accomplished something that many people believed impossible: They ended an era of political dominance through the ballot box. Now, their task is to demonstrate that they can build something better in its place.