What European students can learn from their Serbian peers

While Europe was asleep over the past two years, Serbia was wide awake. A nationwide student movement shook the foundations of a deeply entrenched government and on Sunday, it dealt it an unprecedented electoral blow – something opposition parties had failed to do for more than a decade.

Until the election results came out, the Serbian student movement was largely ignored by international media. The students were seen as naive, irrelevant, disaffected youth.

That they were underestimated by the world and by President Aleksandar Vucic was perhaps to their advantage. But Serbian students did not just rely on their opponent’s overconfidence. For almost two years, they built and practised an alternative model of politics that soon became visible and eventually triumphed at the polls.

Although the student protests were triggered by one particular incident – the death of 16 people in a train canopy collapse at a newly renovated station in 2024 – their anger had much deeper roots.

Students and their families had been squeezed from all sides: by local elites whose corruption and mismanagement eroded the standard of living and plunged them into precarity; and by international corporations, which fed that corruption, while offering substandard jobs with little prospect of social mobility.

The protests the students started were not the first against Vucic and his government. But what was different this time is that they remained independent: neither aligned with any domestic political party nor any of the four superpowers Serbia is dealing with – Russia, China, the European Union and the United States.

Students managed to sustain the pressure because they did not join existing politics. Most Serbian opposition parties are small, centralised and increasingly detached from the crises people face daily. They are also vulnerable to corruption in a country dependent on foreign investment and credit. Associating with them would have been damaging to the movement.

Instead, the students created their own alternative political scene. Across the country, they blockaded and took over universities, bringing higher education to a standstill. They filled squares with peaceful protests and vigils. They set up their own structures to run their affairs at occupied buildings.

This strong self-reliance was apparent at the Faculty of Technical Sciences in Novi Sad — Serbia’s largest university department, with more than 16,000 students enrolled — which I visited for the first time in March 2025. I was invited there to speak to students.

The faculty looked nothing like it had before. Student guards controlled entrances with communication equipment and metal fencing. LED screens in the corridors announced plenaries and alternative lectures for students. There were rooms stocked with food sorted by type, and medical supplies, with student nurses tending to anyone in need. Kitchens, reading rooms and a student-run administration could also be seen at the faculty.

Discussions on current political and economic issues of interest to Serbia, organised by the students’ alternative education sections, often involved 300 to 400 students and lasted five or six hours, covering topics that would later enter the movement’s electoral programme.

This level of organisation, focused around student plenaries, earned them the respect of the general population, and enabled them to withstand the attempts by the police to evict them. The more the government and its repressive apparatus attacked them, the more the people stood with them.

Introducing direct democracy

As this bond between the students and the wider population grew deeper, democratic participation expanded. By March 2025, suffering more and more attacks, the students called for people to establish citizens’ assemblies akin to the student plenaries, in order to aid them in seeking justice for the 16 killed in Novi Sad.

As the Serbian government continued its repressive strategy, the students realised that a change was necessary and made the first public demand for snap elections.

Their approach to electoral politics was the same as their approach to protest: independent, transparent, and democratic.

The students took decisions collectively. They chose academics and activists whom they had invited to their occupied faculties to discuss and debate with well-known public figures. The gender distribution was equal between men and women and between the various university regions.

It was collectively decided that established politicians would not be nominated. The students made it clear they rejected being incorporated into a type of leadership-based politics that was failing all across Europe.

Candidates were chosen after interviews with students. Last summer, I was invited to one such interview session near Novi Sad. There was a large group of 300 students who questioned each candidate. Phones had to be left outside.

This was the hidden abode of a new kind of politics: decisions were made not at a party headquarters by a select few, but by a network of assemblies, local committees and informal institutions. It was leaderless, and in that particular moment, it worked.

The challenges ahead

The Student List has already started negotiations to form the government. The challenges ahead are numerous. Undoing the damage of the past 14 years would be difficult. But even more challenging is the complex geopolitical arena the new government will face.

The first test will come soon enough. In its electoral programme, the Student List made clear that it condemns the genocide in Gaza and would not be complicit in it. How would this principle translate into practice?

Under Vucic, Serbian-Israeli relations grew closer. After October 2023, Serbian arms exports to Israel jumped from $3.3m that year to $126m in 2025. In September, Vucic opened a factory for the production of Israeli drones.

If the new government is to abide by the Student List electoral programme, it would have to halt arms exports to Israel at the very least.

This would not be a symbolic gesture. It would mean extending political change won at the elections into the economic sphere, unsettling Serbia’s foreign relations and challenging the country’s place in the wider geopolitical order. It could be a truly revolutionary moment.

Given the industrial weight of the arms industry, Serbia’s security cooperation with Israel and its reliance on foreign investment, such a decision could provoke resistance from domestic vested interests and pressure from foreign partners.

In this context, it was no surprise that US-based conservative influencers intervened in the final days of the electoral campaign, framing support for Vucic as a defence of Serbia’s Christian identity against “Islamisation” and the so-called Muslim threat.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) — a powerful US conservative organisation — is set to open a Serbian chapter in November, with Vucic expected to play a central role.

Any shift in Serbia’s ties to the superpowers will test the Student List, its ability to survive as a governing force and its capacity to manage tensions while avoiding conflict within Serbia.

That is why the Serbian case matters beyond the Balkans. Europe, facing its own student movements in Belgium, France, Italy and Spain, has largely ignored what happened in Serbia.

But if civil society begins to collapse in the continent’s core countries under increasing economic strain, the political experiment Serbian students have successfully completed may prove invaluable.

The question is no longer whether lessons can be drawn from Serbia, but whether Europe is ready to learn from them — or once again look away, until the crisis arrives at its own door.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.