“We Have Lost”: How Serbia’s Students Beat Vučić at the Ballot Box

Update, 29 October 2026, 11:15 CET. On 28 October the Republic Electoral Commission (RIK) ordered a repeat vote at 53 of the 8,392 polling stations, 31 where results could not be determined and 22 where voting was annulled, to be held on Sunday, 1 November, the second anniversary of the Novi Sad canopy collapse, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported. RIK’s updated preliminary count from 8,338 polling stations gives the Student List 53.04 percent (2,349,689 votes) and the SNS-led “United Serbia” list 38.97 percent (1,726,375 votes), according to the same report. If the repeat vote passes without complaints, final results could be announced in the first week of November, and only then do the deadlines for the new Assembly and government begin to run, the Novi Sad portal NS uživo explained. The figures in the body of this article reflect the count as of 26–27 October and have not been changed; the passage on repeat voting in the section “Now They Must Govern” has been updated.

Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia’s former president, stood at his party headquarters in Belgrade on the night of 25 October and said what few in the country expected to hear: “it is clear that we have lost these elections.” A student-born list with no leader, no party machine and no experience of government won an absolute majority, 140 of 250 seats in the preliminary official allocation, ending 14 years of Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) dominance. The vote came almost two years after a concrete canopy collapsed at the railway station in Novi Sad, killing 16 people and setting off the protests that built the movement. International observers found a competitive vote on an uneven playing field, and this account has found no Serbian Progressive Party voters to quote; both gaps are examined below.

The Night the Strongman Said “We Lost”

Polls in Serbia closed at 8 p.m. on Sunday, 25 October. About an hour and a half later, according to the Associated Press, the man who had run the country for 14 years, “with virtually absolute power,” walked to the podium at SNS headquarters in New Belgrade. BBC’s Serbian service wrote that “the whole of Serbia stopped” around 9:30 p.m. to watch.

Vučić had not yet seen final figures, and he said so. “We still do not have final results,” he told supporters. “On the basis of a sample … it is clear that we have lost these elections, the Student List has won, they will have between 135 and 140 seats and we will have 105,” he said, in the wording reported by The Guardian. In the Serbian original, as Danas published the speech transcript (Danas is one of the outlets the SNS barred from its headquarters that night), the key sentence is shorter and starker: “jasno je da smo mi ove izbore izgubili” (“it is clear that we have lost these elections”). Other translations differ in small ways. AP rendered it as “It is now clear that we have lost and the Students’ List has won,” while Deutsche Welle reported the phrase “based on a stratified sample.” The meaning is the same in every version.

He did not concede gracefully on every point. AP reported that Vučić blamed Serbia’s independent media, along with alleged interference by unnamed European countries and an “American deep state,” for the defeat. Reuters quoted him telling supporters that the party was ready for a new role: “Some businessmen, some people will leave us but our structure is firm, we are very united, very strong, we are used to being in the opposition.” (Reuters’ original page could not be opened for this article; the quote is taken from a syndicated copy.)

Across town, at the headquarters of the Student List, the mood was the opposite. Supporters chanted “Victory, victory!”, applauded, cried and hugged, The Guardian reported, while Radomir Saičić, a chemistry professor at the University of Belgrade, spoke for the movement: “Dear Serbia, tonight the voice of the people is being heard. Tonight we celebrate victory, tomorrow we build the future.”

There was a darker detail in the same hour. DW’s Serbian service recorded that at 9:42 p.m., twelve minutes after the concession, hundreds of young men in hoods and masks walked out of Belgrade’s Pionirski Park, the site of a pro-government tent camp, and disappeared into the night, while some gendarmes who had guarded them looked, in DW’s words, visibly satisfied. AP, for its part, reported that crowds “swiftly dismantled the fences and tents” of the camp and that one tent was later set on fire.

The numbers, as of the first count

Vučić said his own list would end up with about 1.7 million votes against the students’ 2.2 million. The count that followed broadly agreed. According to the Republic Electoral Commission (RIK), as relayed by Vojvodina’s public broadcaster RTV, the Student List won 52.71 percent and 140 seats, and the SNS-led “United Serbia” list 39.17 percent and 104 seats. The remaining six seats went to four national-minority lists. Pollsters CeSID and Ipsos projected 141 seats for the students and 103 for the SNS on their full sample, after an earlier projection of 140 and 103 based on 96 percent of it. The observer group CRTA’s sample-based count put the students at 138 seats. Sources therefore differ by up to three seats; the official allocation is preliminary, and the final RIK report was still pending when this article was written.

One more number matters for context. DW reminded readers that the same polling company had claimed, days earlier, that Vučić was leading by seven percentage points. The Guardian described the campaign-season polls as having “varied wildly.” Whatever else the night proved, it was a reminder of how little the pollsters, or many politicians, expected a result like this.

The Morning After: Belgrade Smells of Freedom

By Monday morning the former tent city in the centre of Belgrade had become a work site. N1 reported that citizens and municipal workers from the city water company, the cleaning service and the parks department were filling rubbish bags in the park that had been closed to the public for about a year and a half, and that had come to be called “Ćacilend” after the people who lived in it. (N1, along with Nova S, Radar and Danas, was barred by Vučić’s party from its election-night headquarters, according to Danas, and much of this article’s Serbian-language reporting comes from these outlets, whose coverage reflects their editorial stance.)

The most striking voices were not officials. One Belgrade woman told N1 she had come straight from work. “We left work to clean up together,” she said, in Serbian. “Last week I walked past here, furious and powerless, and this, as they say, should have happened long ago.” (All quotes from Serbian-language sources in this article are the author’s translations.) A second woman, who lives across the road, said she had not walked on that side of the street for two years. “This is phenomenal,” she said. “And look, I am emotional.”

Not everyone had a ready answer. When N1’s reporter asked why the park had not been cleaned for so long, municipal workers mostly turned away. One, who did speak, said: “Well, everything was closed, we were not allowed, the police, how could we have entered?” Reporters for NPR found a volunteer, Radomir Delic, picking cigarette butts out of the grass. “Yesterday was a big victory, so today is the smell of freedom,” he said. “We are in garbage, but it’s the smell of freedom.”

Slavija, second night

On Monday evening the celebration moved to Slavija, one of Belgrade’s great squares and for months the students’ favourite meeting place. Tens of thousands of people filled the square, according to the weekly Nedeljnik, with songs, chants, flares and fireworks; this is one outlet’s estimate, and no police or independent count was found. A BBC reporter wrote of pushing through a crowd where “you can smell the smoke and gunpowder of the fireworks,” and the voices she found were a mix of disbelief and joy. “This is the happiest day of my life,” said Ljubica Vojnović, wrapped in a flag. “Although I believed in the Student List’s victory, this doesn’t seem real to me.”

Joy was not the only note. Dijana Hrka, mother of Stefan Hrka, one of the 16 people killed in the Novi Sad collapse, was in the crowd on election night. “I have been waiting for this moment for two years,” she told N1, sobbing, as quoted by AP. N1 reported that SNS activists in the camp had sung “Srpkinja je mene majka rodila” (“A Serbian woman gave birth to me”) while she was on hunger strike; that is N1’s account and was not independently confirmed here. At the Novi Sad station, the site of the collapse, a man named Saša Ivković told the BBC the day after the election: “It is sad to tie the death of 16 people to a change of government.”

Even among those celebrating, the mood was not uniformly triumphant toward Vučić. One woman told DW she had not expected the concession. “I have to admit that it may after all be a good gesture on his part,” she said, “to avoid conflicts and unrest and to celebrate a deserved victory in the right way.”

A different version of those hours was told by Russian television. N1, in a review of world media coverage, quoted a Russian television reporter, Daria Grigoreva, who described the celebration as “nocturnal pogroms” in which participants “tore down fences, wrecked tents and burned the camp.” N1 pointed out that the word “pogroms” and “riots” recurred through the report, which it interpreted as concern in Moscow that a new Serbian government might impose sanctions on Russia. That interpretation is N1’s, not established fact. AP’s account, quoted above, confirms that fences and tents were torn down and one tent was set on fire in the abandoned camp.

How One Man Outplayed Everyone, Until the Students

To understand why the result shocked so many Serbs, and observers, it helps to look at who lost. AP’s profile of Vučić calls him a populist strongman who “dominated the Balkan country’s politics for 14 years,” “easily outplayed political opponents in the past and thought he could do it again.” The 56-year-old had been an extreme nationalist in the 1990s, advocating a “Greater Serbia” and serving as information minister under Slobodan Milošević, when AP says media critical of the government were fined heavily or shut down. Around 2012 he shifted to a declared pro-European stance on the eve of his party’s first election win, and the SNS has run the country since, with Vučić as prime minister from 2014 and president from 2017, JAMnews reported.

Dejan Pavlović, professor at the University of Belgrade’s Faculty of Political Sciences, described the method to AP: “He is a competitor who has mastered a technology of governing that is based on stick and carrot, and the idea that nobody but him is right.” The state, Pavlović added, “created a whole new elite in the Serbian society and that elite knew how to be thankful.”

The traditional opposition, meanwhile, spent years in the shadow. BBC’s Serbian service lists how thoroughly it was swept away on 25 October. The Socialist Party of Serbia, a fixture in government since the 1990s, fell out of parliament for the first time, with 2.16 percent. The “European Serbia” coalition, built from Dragan Đilas’s Freedom and Justice Party and others, took 0.28 percent. DW concluded that the vote was “purgatory for smaller parties”: no veteran such as Socialist leader Ivica Dačić or opposition figure Dragan Đilas will sit in the new Assembly. Miloš Jovanović, who led the Authentic Right list, congratulated the winners: “I congratulate the Student List, which won these elections and which will in all likelihood take power and responsibility for running the state,” he said, according to B92, a generally pro-government outlet. Dačić wrote on Instagram, as relayed by the tabloid Telegraf: “It is not terrible to fall; what matters is getting up.”

Vučić’s camp, AP noted, did not run a passive campaign. He resigned the presidency to run for prime minister “in the style of his ally” Vladimir Putin, then ran a fierce campaign that involved “favorable around-the-clock coverage on state media,” cash handouts to voters and promises of higher pensions, new roads and cheaper medicines. The accusation that cash was handed out comes from AP; it is not a finding of any court or electoral body in the sources reviewed for this article.

It is worth being clear about what he kept. AP stressed that Vučić “retained considerable support among many of Serbia’s voters,” whom admirers saw as a capable leader who could steer the country through global uncertainty. He won around 1.7 million votes. Reporting also showed an SNS that had lost the capital but not every bastion: Nova wrote that the SNS and Vučić won in only three of 29 cities, while Danas’s headline framed the result differently, as students winning in 22 cities with Vučić “better in two, in Kosovo and in prisons.” The sources disagree on the count of cities; this article does not rely on either tally.

Finally, there is the regional comparison that nearly every international outlet drew. Reuters noted that the students’ win was “reminiscent of the defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Orban in April.” The Guardian wrote that Vučić’s swift concession echoed that of Orbán six months earlier, “fuelling hopes of a democratic resurgence to central Europe.”

From a Collapsed Canopy to a Leaderless Movement

The story of the Student List starts on 1 November 2024, when a concrete canopy collapsed at the railway station in Novi Sad, killing 16 people. JAMnews’ chronology notes that the station had been renovated shortly before, which raised immediate questions about the quality of the work and the transparency of the public procurement behind it, and that an investigation was opened but did not settle suspicions of corruption and attempts to avoid accountability.

What turned a tragedy into a movement was partly its shape. According to JAMnews, students made decisions at general assemblies called plenums, and from the beginning the movement had no single leader whose removal could halt it. Every day at 11:52, the minute the canopy fell, protesters stopped for a moment of silence, and they held 16-minute silences for the 16 dead. On 22 November, students at Belgrade’s Faculty of Dramatic Arts were attacked during a silent protest, which gave the demonstrations a new focus, and the blockades of universities spread from Novi Sad and Belgrade across the country. On 28 January 2025, Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned, and around the same time Novi Sad’s mayor also stepped down; the students carried on, saying individual resignations did not answer who was responsible or how independent the judiciary was. JAMnews reports that between 275,000 and 325,000 people took part in a mass rally in Belgrade in March 2025, a figure from one outlet that should be treated as an estimate rather than a count. On 5 May 2025, the movement called for snap parliamentary elections.

Vučić gave them what they asked for in September 2026, calling an early vote for 25 October after, in JAMnews’ words, almost two years of student-led protests. He resigned the presidency on 27 September to lead the SNS campaign, according to BBC’s Serbian service. AP and The Guardian both describe him as having denounced the students as a foreign-led or foreign-directed attempt to unseat him, a charge the students dismissed.

Two hundred and fifty names, no leader

The students chose to answer with a slate. The Guardian reported that the Student List fielded 250 candidates for the 250-seat parliament, “ranging from academics to athletes and farmers,” with the slogan “Serbia or Mafia?”, and that the students held rallies, went door to door and turned up in rural areas that had long been Vučić strongholds. The Guardian estimated that about 150,000 people attended their final pre-election rally in Belgrade, a number that, like most crowd figures, is an estimate.

Four names have surfaced most often. Ilija Srdanović, a cardiologist and professor at Novi Sad’s medical faculty, headed the list. Radomir Saičić, a chemistry professor at the University of Belgrade, spoke for the students on election night. Dejan Šoškić, a former central bank governor, is frequently mentioned, and DW’s Serbian service said his name “is often mentioned” in discussions of who might lead a government, though nothing is confirmed. The Guardian also noted the presence of former basketball player Dejan Bodiroga on the list.

What does the movement want? Ana Mirković, an educationist and psychologist and a Student List candidate, told the Guardian that its first priority was “the social and psychological detoxification” of the country. The new government, she said, would dismantle a “system of intimidation” and aim to “rebuild society from the ground up: full disclosure of all contracts and financial flows; depoliticising and strengthening the judiciary; renewing the education and healthcare systems.” The Guardian summarised the written platform: an independent police unit accountable to prosecutors rather than the interior ministry, a purge of police officers linked to organised crime, a ban on appointing party loyalists to state companies and independent scrutiny of major infrastructure contracts.

Foreign policy was deliberately kept in the background. Reuters wrote that the movement does not recognise Kosovo’s independence but wants a referendum on EU accession, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported that Srdanović said the decision on accession “will be made by the citizens.” The Guardian noted that the list “deliberately kept divisive foreign policy issues, including relations with the EU and Russia, in the background.”

Other voices put the movement in a wider frame. Marko Prelec of the International Crisis Group told BBC’s Serbian service that the victory was “a strong political earthquake” because, for the first time in Europe, “a broad movement that resisted pressure to organise as a political party” had won. Dušan Vučićević, an analyst quoted by AFP via The Guardian, said the “experiment in grassroots democracy ultimately secured more than 50% of the vote,” but that it was “unclear whether a similar model could work in other countries.” The Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, a left-leaning German foundation that discloses its political orientation, argued earlier that Vučić’s campaign looked “sluggish and generic” next to the students’ “collective youthful creativity”; that is an advocacy view, not a neutral measurement.

The students’ own accounts are the most human. A student identified only as Filip told N1 at the Student List headquarters: “We believed in ourselves, we believed in the people. We knew that change could happen. That is precisely why it now feels surreal to stand here after two years, with the result being what it is.” Another student, Tanja, said the goal had never been only to remove the SNS from power: “We wanted to build a Serbia in which we want to stay.” Sanja Belić, a professor at the faculty of sciences in Novi Sad and a Student List candidate, said she had never planned to go into politics, but “the sentence that slapped me was ‘sleep peacefully, world, it is not your child.’ We did not stay silent and today we came to victory.”

What the Numbers Say

The raw arithmetic of 25 October is simple: a landslide on a very high turnout. The details are less so, and in several places the sources do not agree.

Votes. As of the counts published on Monday, the Student List had a little over 52.6 percent of the vote and the SNS-led list 39.2 percent, based on 8,135 of 8,392 polling stations, Balkan Insight reported. Other snapshots from the Republic Electoral Commission, taken at slightly different points in the count, put the students between 52.65 and 52.73 percent. Turned into votes, BBC’s Serbian service calculated, the students won more than 2.2 million votes and the Vučić-led coalition 1.7 million, a margin of half a million. Pollsters CeSID and Ipsos, working from a sample of the vote, estimated 52.9 percent against 38.8 percent. CRTA, the civil-society observer group, estimated 52.45 percent for the students with a margin of error of 1.5 percentage points.

Seats. The Republic Electoral Commission’s preliminary allocation gave the students 140 of 250 seats and the SNS list 104, with six for minority lists. Which minority lists? Balkan Insight, reporting the CeSID and Ipsos projection, listed the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians, an Albanian coalition, and two Bosniak lists. The sources differ on the Hungarian minority: the CeSID and Ipsos projection gave its list three seats, while the commission’s preliminary allocation, as reported by RTV, gives it two (and two to the Albanian coalition). The official figure is used here.

Turnout. Turnout was “close to 70%,” which Reuters, citing pollsters and the election commission, called the highest since the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1992. Balkan Insight, citing the commission, had 68.8 percent at the time of its count, and Serbia’s weekly NIN reported an estimated 69.3 percent, which it called the highest since 2008. BBC’s Serbian service called it a record “in the last 20 years.” The sources therefore disagree on how historic the turnout was; what they do agree on is that it was very high. By 7 p.m., CRTA recorded 67.8 percent, against 55.5 percent at the same hour in 2023, and CeSID and Ipsos put it at 67.6 percent. Lines of two hours at some polling stations were reported, including at the one where Vučić voted.

Where the votes came from. The regional portal Una.rs, whose reporting is of lower reliability than the big wires and should be read accordingly, published a regional breakdown. In Belgrade, the Student List won 62.96 percent against 31.63 percent for the SNS list. In Vojvodina it won 52.19 against 39.56, and in Šumadija and western Serbia 50.82 against 39.9. In southern and eastern Serbia the SNS list came out ahead, 45.93 percent to 44.15, and among voters in Kosovo it won 71.63 percent against 21.09. The geography matters for what comes next: the SNS lost the capital and most of the north by wide margins, but it did not disappear from the map.

One telling local detail from BBC’s Serbian service: at polling station 140 in New Belgrade, where the former president himself voted, the Student List won 70.2 percent and the list built around the SNS 25.2 percent.

Counting beyond the top two. The Socialist Party of Serbia, a government partner for most of the past three decades, fell below the threshold with 2.16 percent. The Authentic Right list and the European Serbia coalition also failed to pass. BBC’s Serbian service wrote that the Socialist Party had, until this election, been in power almost continuously since the 1990s.

A Fair Fight? Observers, Irregularities and the Disputed Playing Field

Any honest account of this election has to hold two things in the same hand. The vote on the day was, by most measures, well run, and the contest around it was, by the verdict of international observers, tilted in favour of the SNS.

The international election observation mission, whose preliminary statement was published by ODIHR, the OSCE’s election arm, said the election “unfolded in an atmosphere of profound polarization, with the equality of campaign opportunities seriously compromised.” It added that “entrenched advantages enjoyed by the ruling party, including misuse of state resources, together with intimidation and pressure on voters, candidates, and civil society, as well as disruptions of campaign activities, further marred the electoral environment.” The statement also records “a pronounced bias in monitored media coverage in favour of the incumbent party,” and, more positively, that the mission “positively assessed all stages of the election day process in the vast majority of polling stations observed.” But “reported incidents of physical violence raised serious concerns.” These are preliminary findings; the final report will follow.

The head of the OSCE’s short-term mission told reporters, as paraphrased by BBC’s Serbian service, that the conditions were uneven and that distrust of the voter register persisted because the authorities had not properly explained irregularities.

The domestic observer CRTA had a more granular picture. Its programme director, Raša Nedeljkov, said that “for the first time in Serbia, access to the CEC by voters was blocked,” and that “average citizens were denied the right to report any kind of irregularity, or even approach the building.” He also said it was sad that “European Parliament representatives need police protection while going around Belgrade and Serbia.” According to European Western Balkans, CRTA recorded voters photographing ballot papers at half of polling stations and at 80 percent of those in Belgrade, voting without valid identification at 8 percent of stations and voting on behalf of others at 13 percent. CRTA could not establish whether voters photographed ballots voluntarily or under pressure, but, given the intimidation documented before election day, believed the practice was closely linked to coercion. That is an organisation’s judgment, based on observation, and should be read as one.

Danas, one of the newspapers the SNS barred from its election-night headquarters, listed the day’s incidents as including attacks on poll monitors, the so-called “Bulgarian trains,” parallel voter lists, call-centre activity and eruptions of violence in several cities. The same article records that pro-government media first reported that Vučić’s mother, Angelina, had been attacked and that a man was detained; that claim is attributed to those media and has not been verified here. Freedom House, in its 2026 country report, wrote that “the state and ruling party exercise influence over private media in part through advertising contracts and other indirect subsidies.”

The opposite view comes from the SNS, and it is worth giving it its full weight. Vučić told supporters on election night that the win was “the verification of a revolution that they carried out directly with support of different European countries and the deep American state, the one that is also against President (Donald) Trump,” according to AP’s translation. Balkan Insight rendered it as “a verification of a revolution that they carried out directly with support of various European countries, and the US’s deep state.” The Serbian original, reported by the weekly Vreme, reads “verifikacija revolucije” (“verification of a revolution”), and RFE/RL’s English version uses the word “legitimization,” another sign of how translations shape what readers hear. He called the winners “merely carrying out dirty work devised by someone else to bring down a sovereign country,” adding, in RFE/RL’s account: “You succeeded for a moment. We’ll see [for how long].” In the Serbian transcript published by Danas he says: “Ja im čestitam, iako su oni samo izvođači radova,” roughly “I congratulate them, even though they are merely contractors,” literally “executors of works.”

Breitbart News, an American outlet that interviewed Vučić in May, echoed the framing in its headline, which calls the winners a “‘Deep State’-Backed Student Movement.” Breitbart presents the allegation as fact. On the specific accusation that CRTA, the main observer, is a foreign-funded front, the evidence available points the other way. Poynter reported in 2025, after a police raid on CRTA’s offices in February of that year, that “there’s no evidence that CRTA was violating the terms of its USAID contract,” and that the International Fact-Checking Network called CRTA a “reputable civil society organization.” That is not proof that no foreign funding exists in Serbian civil society; it is a finding about one organisation and one contract.

For context, the same pattern appeared in the previous parliamentary election. OCCRP reported that after the December 2023 vote, CRTA’s election-day observers found signs of “organized voter migration” at 71 Belgrade polling stations, 14 percent of those observed, and that one statistical technique yielded a lower-bound estimate of 30,000 extra votes for the ruling party; this article does not carry those figures forward to 2026, but they help explain why observers arrived with a long list of concerns.

How much did all of this matter? Here the evidence runs out. Nothing in the sources reviewed suggests that the outcome was changed: Vučić himself accepted it within an hour and a half of the polls closing, and a Student List member of parliament-elect, the sociologist Jovo Bakić, told DW the margin was so large that “there can be no fiddling,” an opinion of a winner, not evidence. What the observers describe is an unequal race that the challenger won anyway.

The Loser Speaks: Vučić, the SNS and What Remains

Vučić’s concession speech lasted much longer than the sentence that made headlines, and it is worth reading closely, because it shows how he tried to shape the meaning of his defeat in real time. Danas published a transcript, which is the source for the passages below; the English renderings are this article’s own translations from the Serbian.

The speech had three registers. The first was administrative, and it mattered most for what came next. “We will not play with lawsuits, appeals, objections to the Administrative Court,” he said. “Let them count this as recognised election results.” Later he went further and addressed the fear, widely voiced in the days before the vote, that the SNS might use parliamentary procedure to stall a student government. His own party, he said, would not “delay, block” or refuse to verify mandates; the Assembly, he noted, could be formed “in ten, fifteen days” and a government shortly after. Serbian legal experts quoted by Nova, discussed below, say the SNS could not have blocked the process even if it had wished to.

The second register was combative. He said the SNS would have “around 105” deputies, adding “as if it matters,” and promised the party would “fight and show them what an opposition is and what force is.” He called the winners “contractors” carrying out “dirty work” designed by others to bring down “a sovereign country,” described the result as “the verification of a revolution” carried out with the support of European countries and the “deep state” in America, and said the new authorities would do “everything they did not want to tell you.” He predicted that sanctions on Russia would follow “by March or April.” That is a forecast from a man with an obvious interest in the claim, and it contradicts what the winners have said so far: The Independent reports that the students have said they have no plans to align with the EU and impose sanctions on Moscow. He also said that “in six months nobody will be cheerful and joyful,” and that “we know we will be targets of persecution.”

He also reached for the vocabulary he had used against the press for years, calling journalists at N1 and Nova S “the dirtiest scum,” and, in a line that will puzzle readers unfamiliar with Serbian politics, congratulated the human rights campaigner Nataša Kandić because “her politics won.” The sentence reads as a jibe, not a compliment, and the sources reviewed do not explain it further.

The third register was personal. “It is not that I am glad,” he said near the end. “Not for myself. I am not glad for the country.” And: “Life is a struggle. You are not successful if you never fall.” He ended by singing “Ruzmarin,” a folk song, while Milorad Dodik, the Montenegrin politician Milan Knežević and the SNS leaders Miloš Vučević and Ana Brnabić stood beside him.

Nova later reported the Republic Electoral Commission’s preliminary count as 2,267,615 votes for the Student List and 1,685,022 for his list, close to the sample-based figures of about 2.2 million and 1.72 million that he gave in the speech. He also claimed the SNS had “won everywhere Serbs live,” including in Kosovo, where his list did lead; within Serbia, regional data show him ahead only in the south and east, and then narrowly.

The headquarters, the party and the aftermath

The mood at the SNS headquarters, as Danas described it, was far removed from the confident celebrations of previous election nights. Danas, which the party had barred from the building along with N1, Nova S and Radar, wrote that the pro-government television station Informer, whose editor Dragan J. Vučićević had declared a decisive SNS win, switched to the headquarters only to find what the paper called a “wake.” The paper’s coverage reflects its editorial position and its exclusion from the event, and the word is its own.

SNS figures spoke in more measured terms. Marina Raguš, a candidate on the list, said on election night that the party accepted the results and would continue “the political fight in parliament, where we will have more than 105 mandates,” according to B92, a generally pro-government outlet. Ivica Dačić, whose Socialist Party of Serbia fell below the threshold with about 2.2 percent, wrote on Instagram: “It is not terrible to fall, it is important to get up. As always until now, we will get up, even stronger and firmer… The people and this party will live!” The Socialists failed to clear the threshold, and the political scientist Đorđe Vukadinović, in comments carried by the Novi Sad portal 021, said he thought they would struggle to survive these results.

Not every encounter was dignified, on either side. N1, citing the weekly Vreme, reported that Brnabić, who is third on the SNS list and now both Speaker of the dissolved Assembly and acting head of state, argued with a group celebrating the Student List in central Belgrade. According to the report she told the group she had been insulted as she passed, shouted “arrest me” and “ride me,” and the crowd answered with the farewell song “A, sad adio!” (“Well, now goodbye!”). N1’s account does not say what preceded the exchange beyond her own description of it, so this article treats it as a one-sided report of a street argument, not an established sequence of events.

When a crowd entered a television studio

The most uncomfortable episode for the winning side came the next evening, and a fair account has to include it, with one caution: the sources describe “a group of citizens,” not members of the Student List, and none establishes who they were beyond those named. On Monday around 18:40, according to the Vojvodina public broadcaster RTV, a group of citizens entered the studio of Informer, interrupting the programme. Vučićević and his colleagues left the studio, and he asked live on air for the police and an ambulance. The Croatian daily Slobodna Dalmacija reported that among those who entered was Dijana Hrka, the mother of Stefan Hrka, one of the sixteen people killed in the Novi Sad canopy collapse, and that the group demanded an apology for an alleged remark about “16 fake victims” that Informer denies having made. Vučićević said on air, according to that paper, “They will kill someone, there are children in the building.” Crowds also gathered at the RTS public broadcaster, where by RTV’s account the mood was calm enough that people danced a kolo, and outside the TV Pink building, where, according to N1’s headline, a police cordon protected the building while eggs and bottles flew.

The Student List responded quickly. It said it did not support incursions into media outlets and institutions and, in a statement quoted by RTV, added: “We will liberate the media in the Assembly, through an institutional fight for freedom and professional journalism.” Ilija Srdanović, the list’s top candidate, urged people to remain “calm and dignified.”

Vučić used the incident the following day. Speaking at his party’s slava, he said, according to N1, that “if the state does not react, in the days ahead we will have to make our own decisions,” and that if the “terror” continued and the authorities did nothing, “we will be forced to organise ourselves,” adding that the authorities would bear “all the responsibility.” The remark is ambiguous and should not be over-read: it is a conditional warning from a defeated leader whose party still controls local government and the provincial administration, and which BBC’s Serbian service notes retains those posts. But it shows that the first test of the new order will be whether it can keep its own crowds within the law while it asks the old state apparatus to do the same.

Now They Must Govern

The Student List has won a majority; it has not yet won the state. The path from a landslide to a functioning government runs through a set of constitutional deadlines that are not fully fixed yet, because the clock does not start until the Republic Electoral Commission (RIK) announces the final result.

As RTV explains, the commission has 96 hours from the receipt of all local summary reports to publish its overall report. Nova adds that it then has ten days to allocate mandates, that the first session of the new Assembly must be held within 30 days of the announcement, and that the session is convened by the Speaker of the previous Assembly, who is Brnabić. The government must be formed within 90 days after that, according to Al Jazeera. A member of the RIK, speaking to 021, said objections could be filed until Wednesday and that final results might come as early as Thursday; the same page notes that the start of the 96-hour clock depends on whether complaints are lodged. Vučić, as noted, has said the SNS will not file any.

There has been a public argument about whether the SNS could drag this out. Nova asked two legal experts, and both said it could not. Jelena Jerinić, a law professor and former member of parliament, said that “constituting the new Assembly does not depend on the will of the SNS,” because confirming two-thirds of mandates “is not the same as attendance at the session or voting at the session” but “a technical procedure.” Zoran Alimpić, a member of the Belgrade electoral commission, said that the only way the process could still be “stretched out” would be through repeated voting at some polling stations, where the RIK plays the key role. That was a hypothetical when this article was first written; on 28 October the RIK ordered a repeat vote at 53 polling stations (see the update at the top). Before that decision, a Danas headline quoting Nedeljkov that annulments at some polling stations are a “realistic scenario” is the only sign that this is more than a theory, and only the headline, not the story, was available for this article.

The presidency adds another clock. Vučić resigned on 27 September, and Brnabić is acting president; The Guardian reports that new presidential elections must be held before 27 December. None of the sources reviewed names a presidential candidate for the list, and Crta’s Raša Nedeljkov said the election must be called by 27 November. A presidential contest is thus the next place where the SNS, now an opposition party but still holding local power, can try to regain ground.

Who will lead, and what they have promised

Who the prime minister will be remains an open question. Al Jazeera describes Srdanović, a cardiologist and professor at the University of Novi Sad who headed the list, as “seen as the most likely candidate to become the next prime minister,” but adds that it is unclear who will take over key ministries. DW’s Serbian service reports that the name of Dejan Šoškić, a former governor of the National Bank of Serbia, “is often mentioned.” The movement is, in the words of The Guardian, “deliberately leaderless.” Srdanović has not ruled out the premiership but said the list has “more than one candidate for every position,” according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

The programme described in the sources is anti-corruption first: an independent police unit accountable to prosecutors rather than the interior ministry, a purge of officers linked to organised crime, a ban on appointing party loyalists to state companies, and public scrutiny of major infrastructure contracts. Ana Mirković, a university educator and candidate, told The Guardian the winners “do not see the election result as gaining power and privileges, but as taking on a historic debt to our own people,” and that their first priority was “the social and psychological detoxification” of the country. The economic platform, as The Independent summarises it, targets retail monopolies to lower food prices and a tax overhaul that raises levies on the wealthy; the IMF forecasts growth of 3 percent this year, while inflation reached 4.1 percent in September. Those are the programme’s stated aims and an outside forecast; none has yet been costed in public in the sources available.

The hard parts

Several analysts, with different vantage points, agree that governing will be harder than winning. Florian Bieber of the University of Graz told Germany’s Tagesschau that a broad movement “can bring down a government, but not govern,” and that being “clever until Sunday evening” is over: “Now they have to go public. Now they also have to be more transparent.” (Translation from the German.) His Vienna colleague Vedran Džihić said that overthrowing the regime “is one thing, getting a new democratic beginning in Serbia off the ground is the other question,” noting that foreign policy had been largely “left out.” In Belgrade, the philosopher Ivan Milenković told DW that “power is harder to hold than to win,” and that the new authorities must “cut off all the tentacles of the octopus, but while observing the law.” (Translation from the Serbian.) Nikola Burazer of the Centre for Contemporary Politics said the movement’s decision-making needed to “be sped up” because choosing its candidates took months.

The Guardian drew a comparison with Hungary, where Péter Magyar’s Tisza party defeated Viktor Orbán’s government this spring, noting that both face public institutions staffed with civil servants loyal to the outgoing regime. The comparison is the newspaper’s, and the two situations differ: the Student List has an even larger majority but no pre-existing party structure.

On the external side, The Independent lists dilemmas the winners kept out of the campaign. Serbia’s oil refinery depends on US sanctions waivers while Russia’s stake in the energy company NIS awaits sale to Hungary’s MOL, and Russia’s Gazprom supplies around 2.2 billion cubic metres of gas a year at below-market prices; the students have called this “an acute economic dependency,” not “a geopolitical alignment.” The list’s position on Kosovo, which it calls a “temporarily occupied region,” is at odds with EU membership, which requires normalising relations with Pristina, the paper notes. Marko Prelec of the International Crisis Group said, in a BBC Serbian report, that Kosovo Serbs will now be “free to choose representatives without pressure from Belgrade.” (Translation from the Serbian.)

The World Reads the Result

International reaction came quickly, and it divided, broadly, into those who saw a democratic opening and those who saw a geopolitical question mark.

In Brussels the tone was warm. Ursula von der Leyen wrote: “We stand ready to support reforms on the rule of law, media freedom, the fight against corruption and strong democratic institutions.” Marta Kos, the enlargement commissioner, said “a new chapter can begin for Serbia. The door to the EU is open.” Council of Europe Secretary General Alain Berset welcomed Vučić’s acceptance of the result. Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said Berlin would “actively support Serbia’s European path.” Among neighbours, Croatia’s Andrej Plenković said he expected “better relations,” having heard “very moderate, rational and reasonable messages” from the winning camp, and Hungary’s Magyar said he had spoken by phone to its leaders.

Kyiv’s response was also warm, and the exact wording varies by source. Volodymyr Zelensky wrote that “this is clearly a new chapter in the history of the country and its people,” in the Kyiv Independent’s version, which is also what The Guardian quotes; Euromaidan Press and Interfax-Ukraine carry the message under the headline that Ukraine is “ready to keep increasing cooperation.” Zelensky also thanked Serbia for “respecting our people, our state, and our independence,” according to The Guardian, a notable line given that Vučić refused to join EU sanctions on Russia.

Washington’s first reaction was measured. BBC’s Serbian service quoted a State Department spokesperson as saying, in translation: “We have seen the preliminary results, as well as the conduct of former president Vučić,” and that Washington looks forward to “expanding our partnership with Serbia.” The Pavlovic Today, a Washington outlet, carried the statement in English: “We welcome the Serbian people’s participation in their parliamentary elections… We look forward to continuing to expand our partnership with Serbia’s newly elected members of parliament, and people as we build on the momentum created in the last year, including with the launch of the Strategic Dialogue.” That outlet also reports 139 seats for the students and 97 for the SNS, figures that do not match the RIK or CeSID projections elsewhere in this article, so its numbers are not used here. Neither source mentions a statement from the White House, and none was found.

Moscow’s reaction was more guarded, and it came through several different voices. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia “highly values” Vučić’s contribution, adding that “it takes two to tango.” The TASS wire, as mirrored by Pravda Serbia, quotes him as saying “We acknowledge the results of the elections held in Serbia.” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow “expects that the leadership of Serbia, after forming a government based on the election results, will preserve the existing positive momentum in our relations,” in BBC’s Serbian rendering. Konstantin Kosachev, a deputy speaker of the Federation Council, said the outcome could mean “there would be one sovereign country less in Europe,” while the nationalist tycoon Konstantin Malofeyev welcomed Vučić’s defeat, calling it a verdict on “political hypocrisy and duplicity.” The split among Russian voices is worth noting: the Kremlin hedged, a senator sounded an alarm and a hawkish media owner celebrated.

A caution about propaganda is needed here. According to N1’s review of world media, a Russian state television reporter described the celebrations in Belgrade as “pogroms,” and N1 interpreted this as an attempt to frighten viewers away from the idea of a Serbian government that might impose sanctions on Russia. That interpretation is N1’s, not established fact. The Pravda Serbia mirror of TASS is a state-aligned source and is used here only to confirm what Peskov said, not for any assessment of events.

Dodik: congratulations and a record

No regional reaction drew more comment than that of Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian Serb leader and the SNS’s closest regional ally. He had stood beside Vučić at the concession, and Vučić asked him to cooperate with the new leadership. Hours later Dodik wrote on X: “I congratulate the Student List on its victory. The citizens of Serbia and all political actors have once again demonstrated the democratic character of one of the oldest state-forming peoples in Europe,” and thanked Vučić for “the understanding of the same people, the same fate and the same interest.” He added: “Republika Srpska and Serbia continue forward together… Because Serbs on both sides of the Drina are one people and will remain so.” (Danas and Telegraf render the post in Serbian, the English is this article’s translation.)

The congratulation sat awkwardly with his own record. Danas, republishing a report by Klix.ba, recalled that in a 15 October interview with the Belgrade tabloid Alo he had said that the Student List “would not and cannot win,” that Serbia was not “so crazy as to hand the keys” to “people who hate half of their own people,” and that Republika Srpska “would be their first target.” The same report noted a February 2025 rally speech, in which he referred to “smradovi” (stinkers) who call themselves intellectuals, which opposition figures understood as an attack on protesters, although he did not name the students. Dodik’s pivot is one data point and not evidence of his private view, which the sources do not reveal. Others in the Serb entity took a similar line: Draško Stanivuković, leader of the Movement Safe Srpska, congratulated the list and said Serbia and Republika Srpska should keep “the closest fraternal ties.”

What We Do Not Know

A fair account of the weekend has to mark the edges of what has been established. Multiple sources confirm the main outline: the Student List won, with a margin of roughly 13 points over the SNS in the preliminary count; Vučić conceded on the night; and international observers found a competitive election in an uneven environment. Much else is less solid.

Final results are pending. Every percentage and seat count in this article is preliminary. Sources disagree on the exact seat split: the RIK’s early count gave the students 140 and the SNS list 104, CeSID/Ipsos gave 141 and 103, Crta’s own estimate was 138, and Vučić said 105 for his side. The Hungarian minority’s seats were put at two by Nova and three by Al Jazeera and Vučić. Danas, citing Crta’s preliminary figures, gave the students 51.47 percent and the SNS list 40.42, a different reading from the RIK’s 52.71 and 39.17.

The polls disagreed before the vote. The German Marshall Fund, summarising the pre-election surveys, noted that a Crta poll in July put the students at 44.9 percent and the SNS at 35.7, while Faktor Plus in September had the SNS at 48.6 and the students at 37.1, and NSPM had the students at 44.4 and the SNS at 41.7. None of those three anticipated a margin as large as the roughly thirteen points in the preliminary count, and DW noted that Ipsos, one of the firms projecting the result on election night, had days earlier claimed a seven-point Vučić lead. Why the polls diverged is a question none of the sources answers.

Turnout framing differs. The RIK reported 68.8 percent at the time of that count; NIN estimated 69.3 percent, the “highest since 2008,” while BBC and the Guardian call it respectively a record “in 20 years” and the highest since 1992. The comparison depends on which past elections are used as the baseline, and the sources do not agree.

Crowd sizes and incidents come from single outlets. The tens of thousands in Slavija square are from Nedeljnik, a weekly, and from 021, a regional portal; we found no police or independent estimate. The Informer incident is reported by a regional public broadcaster, a Croatian daily and N1; the one detail with a clear dispute, the “16 fake victims” remark, is denied by Informer and unverified here.

The city count differs. Nova reported that the SNS won only three of 29 cities, while a Danas headline said the students won 22 cities and Vučić was ahead “in two, in Kosovo and in prisons.” The sources reviewed do not explain how the two count.

What is simply missing. We did not find on-the-record interviews with SNS voters, which is a gap in balance: the voices of the 1.7 million who voted for Vučić’s list appear here only through the party’s own officials and through what he himself said. NATO’s reaction and any White House statement could not be found. The status of any prosecutions arising from the Novi Sad collapse is not addressed in the sources reviewed and is not discussed here. And the intentions of the winners on contested questions, including the EU, Kosovo and Russia, are known only from campaign statements, some of them contradictory.

After the Celebration

The sources agree on how the night ended, even if they differ on what it means. A leader who had dominated Serbian politics since 2014 stood in front of his supporters and said he had lost, and, within a day, tens of thousands of people filled the capital’s streets, cleaned a park and sang. That is the mainstream account, and the evidence behind it is strong.

The critical account is just as well supported. The playing field was tilted, as the observers recorded; the winners had no programme on the questions that will matter most in the first months; and the movement’s own crowds, on the second evening, entered a television studio and frightened its staff, an act the Student List condemned within hours. The SNS’s still-considerable base, its hold on local governments, and its leader’s “we will be forced to organise ourselves” show that the transition is not guaranteed to be smooth.

The alternative reading, offered by Vučić and echoed in the headline of a US outlet, that the result was engineered from abroad, finds no support in the one fact-check this article could locate, which found no evidence that Crta had violated its USAID contract, though that finding concerns a single organisation. It is better understood as a political claim than as a factual one, and it did not prevent Vučić from accepting the result.

A closing note, marked as the author’s view. The test of this election may be less what happened on Sunday than what the winners do with the first hundred days. Their leaderlessness and patience may have helped them win, though no source in this account can show that this, and not anger over the canopy collapse or fatigue with the old government, was the decisive factor. Governing requires names, deadlines and decisions, and the same movement will now be judged by the standard it set for the people it replaced: whether it obeys the rules when it has the power to bend them. Serbia’s voters have given it the chance to show that, and they have, by their turnout, shown that they will be watching.