Serbia's Student-Led Protests Have Vucic Cornered

Yahoo

31-03-2025

On March 15, an estimated crowd of 300,000 demonstrators took to the streets throughout Serbia's capital city of Belgrade to stage the largest protests in the country's history. The massive Belgrade rally was the latest in a series of student-led marches across the country that have been gaining momentum since November 2024. They serve as a testament to the shifting tide of Serbian politics and the public's frustration with the rampant corruption that is by now synonymous with the regime of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic.
The protests initially began after a concrete canopy collapsed at the central railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia's second-largest city, killing 14 people immediately, with two more victims subsequently succumbing to injuries sustained in the incident. Despite having taken credit amid much fanfare for the reconstruction of the station in July 2024, the government quickly attempted to wash its hands of responsibility for the tragedy that occurred just four months later. However, the Higher Public Prosecutor's Office in Novi Sad argued that the institutions entrusted with maintaining the railway station were responsible for the canopy's corrosion, while further public scrutiny raised suspicions that the added concrete layers during reconstruction contributed to the accident.
Furthermore, calculations by outside experts indicate that the reconstruction of the station building should have cost no more than €3 million—a stark contrast with the €16 million spent on the building alone. Worse still, according to former Minister of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure Goran Vesic, €65 million was reportedly dedicated to the entire project.
Though a significant turning point, the tragedy was merely the latest demonstration of the corruption and negligence that have been hallmarks of Vucic's ruling Progressive Party, or SNS, over the past decade. Vucic himself has been in power in one role or another since 2012, serving as the country's deputy prime minister, prime minister and now president over that time. His ruling methods have been described as characteristic of a hybrid regime, maintaining the formality of elections and some democratic practices while keeping a firm grip on the media and much of the financial and hard-power instruments of control.
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Over the past two years, however, a series of fatal incidents have fed public outrage, including unprecedented mass shootings that claimed 19 lives in the span of two consecutive days in May 2023 and a fire at a nursing home in January 2025 that left 11 senior citizens dead. The list of similar incidents is both extensive and exhaustive, with each generating varying degrees of public backlash.
This raises the question of what makes the latest round of protests stand out. In the context of Serbian politics, the primary reason behind their success lies in their politically leaderless and peaceful nature, as well as the ingenuity of the student protesters, who have demonstrated admirable organizational skills. In particular, throughout the demonstrations, which have often included countrywide marches of hundreds of miles between Serbia's major cities, the students have carefully avoided the traps that Vucic and his allies have previously laid for Serbian opposition movements.
First and foremost, this has consisted of targeting individual opposition leaders, both existing and emerging, with relentless smear campaigns, a tactic the government has been successfully executing for years. These campaigns have predominantly focused on accusations of corruption or unpatriotic sentiment, both of which hold significant weight in a traditional society like Serbia. While the public has not necessarily taken these campaigns at face value, the sheer amount of negative messaging targeting opposition figures often left them tainted among the electorate.
To evade this well-worn tactic, the student organizers of the most recent protests did much of their work behind closed doors, in university-style plenums away from the public eye. Furthermore, they were quick to distance themselves from activists attempting to assume leadership roles in the rallies. In many ways, the students represent the future of the country, both figuratively and literally, in that they bear no identifiable traces of a murky past or shady dealings that could be attributed to them. And they proudly display Serbia's national flag at the protests, signaling that they hold Serbian society's traditional values close to their hearts.
That has helped fuel another difference between these protests and previous iterations: the divided allegiance of older citizens, who generally make up the government's traditional base. Increasingly disillusioned with the hubris of local SNS office-holders, Serbia's senior citizens have found themselves torn between the students—whom they have been embracing as they would their own grandchildren, which in many instances is the case—and Vucic, whose narrative in recent months has become increasingly febrile and reactive. Faced with such a stark choice, the preferences of the elderly appear to be shifting away from the president.
Finally, opposition parties have supported the students and contributed to the protest movement by disrupting the work of municipal assemblies that have lost legitimacy in the public eye. But a clear division of labor seems to have emerged organically. As mentioned, opposition leaders have not taken a leading public-facing role, nor have they been featured speakers at any of the rallies or traffic blockades that have taken place across Serbia over the past four months. That reflects the fact that the students have clearly won over the Serbian public, achieving more in the past four months than any opposition party has managed in the past 13 years of SNS rule.
The demonstrations have now led to widespread acts of civil disobedience beyond the protests themselves, including public service workers openly siding with the students, an increasing number of workers across different sectors going on strike and even public acts of defiance by national television employees. Although the country's security services have not defected, signs of discontent among them have been widely discussed. Protesters increasingly report friendly encounters with police units, including their willingness to share information about the presence and whereabouts of regime-planted provocateurs within the protests. Meanwhile, the SNS has increasingly faced difficulties holding even minor rallies or setting up outreach booths in its constituencies, as disgruntled citizens keep showing up to confront them.
Interestingly enough, the students' demands have never included the resignation of government officials or Vucic himself, even though public sentiment clearly leans in that direction. Instead, they have consistently called for greater accountability and the release of all documents that would help uncover those responsible for the fatal accident in November. Nevertheless, despite refusing to meet the students' stated demands, Prime Minister Milos Vucevic ultimately resigned due to mounting public pressure in January. After some stalling by the SNS, parliament formally accepted Vucevic's resignation on March 19, disbanding the government and triggering a 30-day deadline for either forming a new one or calling snap elections. That leaves the SNS with mere weeks to come up with a solution to the crisis, but with no real pathways to a favorable outcome.
Thus far, the regime's main public response has been to search for a narrative to undermine the protests. The best it could come up with so far was to portray them as a 'threat from abroad,' with Vucic repeatedly calling them a 'color revolution.' This narrative aims to deter conservative audiences from further participation in the popular revolt for fear of acting as pawns of 'globalist' architects of regime change. Yet paradoxically, throughout this time, officials from the European Union have been tacitly voicing their support for Vucic and his party by continuing to issue communiques about ongoing affairs in a business-as-usual fashion.
Meanwhile, as is nearly always the case, Russia has been echoing the color revolution rhetoric while refraining from direct involvement in Serbia's domestic affairs, although Moscow's messaging has lately been less supportive of Vucic due to a diplomatic spat over a United Nations resolution. And the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has been signaling it is prepared to continue working with Vucic, including through a visit by Donald Trump Jr. to Belgrade, where he met with Vucic in mid-March, and comments by Trump's special envoy Richard Grenell's on X warning the protesters against the use of violence. Unsurprisingly though, the protests do not appear to be high on the list of Washington's priorities, as no other U.S. official has commented on the situation in Serbia to date.
Facing an increasingly precarious situation, Vucic now has limited room for maneuver. He could push for the naming of a new SNS government, which would amount to a mere reshuffling of the party's existing cohort of faceless loyalists and would do nothing to ease growing public discontent. Alternatively, he could agree to a transitional power-sharing government with the opposition that would set the stage for fairer elections in due course, a proposal already put forward by some parties in parliament. Finally, Vucic could opt for a technical government of experts that would likely enjoy public support as an interim solution to the ongoing crisis.
However, none of these options offer Vucic a path to comfortably maintaining the status quo, leaving him in many ways cornered, with the ruling party's mechanisms for holding onto power steadily crumbling. Unlikely to allow the formation of any sort of transitional government, as this would effectively spell the end of his control over the media and his ability to influence electoral processes, Vucic could still resort to a much darker fourth option: quelling the protests with brute force.
While the students never intended to turn the March 15 protest into a popular revolt seeking regime change, Vucic's effort to secure the perimeter around the presidential offices with fences, tractors, paid pro-government campers and riot police forces has stoked fears that he might be prepared to fight tooth and nail to stay in power at all costs.
Worryingly, security forces seem to have already resorted to the use of sonic weapons, which were apparently deployed to disperse the crowd while it was observing a moment of silence during the March 15 protest, resulting in horrifying images of panic. Some experts claim that the available evidence is consistent with the noise and effect typically produced by a Vortex Ring Gun or Vortex Cannon, leading some to speculate about the use of a long-range acoustic device. Yet Serbia's Ministry of Interior has since denied deploying any acoustic weapons against the protesters.
However, given that the ministry's public messaging shifted from denying possession of such a device to acknowledging it was in storage and finally to admitting it was used in the field but not as a weapon, the public has been further enraged by what amounts to a familiar pattern of denial and concealment. Considering the timing of its use and the lack of any threat posed by the protesters to law enforcement, public concern over the government's propensity for violence has intensified. Commentators thus continue to speculate that Vucic may indeed opt for measures as severe as martial law if all else fails.
Still, even if Vucic and his party end up overcoming the ongoing outburst of discontent throughout the country, there is no scenario in which the public will somehow forget its deep dissatisfaction with Serbia's existing ruling class. As a result, it appears that the regime's days in power are numbered and that a transition to a post-SNS era may soon be on the horizon. What remains to be seen is whether Serbia will get there through a peaceful transition or a more dangerous escalation.
Stefan Antić is a Serbian political scientist.
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