About 150,000 Students' Supporters Rally in Belgrade Before Serbian Election
Roughly 150,000 supporters of Serbia's opposition student movement rallied in Belgrade on Thursday, days before Sunday's parliamentary election. The movement hopes to end more than 14 years of rule by President Aleksandar Vucic's party.
About 150,000 people gathered in Slavija Square in Belgrade, Serbia's capital, on Thursday to back the opposition student movement ahead of parliamentary elections on Sunday, 25 October. The movement hopes to unseat the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), the rightwing populist party of veteran leader Aleksandar Vucic, which has governed for more than 14 years. The turnout figure comes from the Archive of Public Gatherings, an independent group that monitors crowd sizes.
A leaderless movement
The Student List is a leaderless movement of student-backed candidates. It has 250 candidates running for the 250-seat parliament, and many come from academia or are deliberate political outsiders. Its platform is broad, but the core pledge is to fight corruption.
The movement grew out of almost two years of student-led protests. They were set off by the 2024 collapse of a canopy at the newly renovated Novi Sad railway station, which killed 16 people. The disaster is widely blamed on corruption. The protests began as demands for a transparent investigation and grew into calls for an early election.
Addressing the crowd, university professor Jugoslav Gasic, one of the candidates, promised to end 14 years of "humiliation, chaos and betrayal". The crowd chanted "Victory, victory!"
Vucic urges supporters to defeat the movement
Vucic, who has served as prime minister or president for over a decade, called the snap vote last month. He resigned in order to run for prime minister. Speaking to supporters at a sports hall in the capital on Thursday, he urged them to "defeat them decisively", referring to the student movement, which he has regularly accused of being a foreign-funded coup attempt.
Concerns over the vote
Civil society groups say the campaign has been marred by intimidation, arrests and misuse of public resources. On Wednesday, Belgrade prosecutors questioned six people arrested on suspicion of plotting "violence, riots and attacks" on election day. Serbia lacks reliable independent polling, and the surveys that exist have produced widely differing results.
