Riding an extraordinary wave of public mobilization, Serbia’s student-led opposition heads into Sunday’s snap parliamentary election genuinely believing it can break President Aleksandar Vučić’s 14-year grip on power.
Yet beneath the euphoria of this week’s mass rallies lies a pervasive conviction among its supporters that the contest will be anything but fair—and that the ruling party will resort to outright ballot theft rather than concede defeat.
On Thursday night, that tension was on full display as hundreds of thousands of people flooded into Belgrade’s central Slavija Square, filling the surrounding boulevards in a buoyant, flag-waving display of collective defiance. The assembly marked the movement's final campaign rally ahead of an early vote that serves as the culmination of nearly two years of youth-led unrest against Vučić’s rule.
What began in November 2024 as grief and outrage following the collapse of a newly renovated railway station canopy in the northern city of Novi Sad—a disaster that killed 16 people and was turned by the protesting youth into a lethal symbol of state corruption and crony contracting—has since metastasized into a nationwide rebellion.
Now polling in a dead heat with the governing Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), the youth movement’s “Students’ List” has mounted the most formidable electoral challenge Vučić has faced in over a decade. But across the sea of demonstrators in the capital, few harbored illusions about how the ruling machine will be handling the vote.
“I believe he will do anything he can to steal the votes and remain in power,” said Katarina Zajić, 45, a food technologist who works as an administrative clerk in the Belgrade municipality of Zemun.
That skepticism is informed by years of documented electoral abuse. International election observers, led by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and backed by European Union institutions, have consistently found that while Serbian elections offer voters a nominal choice of candidates, the playing field is fundamentally compromised. In report after report, monitors have cited pervasive state capture of broadcast media, intense pressure on public-sector workers to mobilize for the ruling coalition, the routine abuse of public resources for partisan gain, and deep-seated anomalies in the voter register.
Domestic watchdogs have leveled even harsher verdicts. The Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA), Serbia’s prominent independent election observation group, concluded that recent election cycles—including the disputed parliamentary and municipal votes in 2023 and 2024—were “not free and fair.” The watchdog documented organized voter migration schemes, the mass registration of “phantom voters,” and the wholesale erasure of the boundary between state institutions and the ruling party.
Vučić and his party have vehemently denied any wrongdoing, routinely dismissing allegations of electoral manipulation as the reflexive excuses of “sore losers” fabricating an alibi for their own political weakness.
“These were by far the cleanest and fairest elections to date, and everyone knows it,” Vučić declared following the 2023 ballot, even as opposition leaders launched hunger strikes and thousands took to the streets to protest organized cross-border voter bussing.
For many of those who massed in Belgrade on Thursday, however, the gap between the government’s assurances and the documented reality on the ground has left them preparing for a confrontation that will not end at the ballot box.
“Vučić never organized fair elections. He never won the elections he didn’t organize, and there won’t be any difference this time,” said David, 45, who attended Thursday’s rally. “The more people come out for the elections, the bigger the chance to win against him. But if he still tries to steal, well, I don’t know... the streets.”
He paused, measuring the consequences of what might follow Sunday night.
“Violence is the last answer,” he said. “But if that’s the answer, we’re probably going to have to go that way.”
