A grassroots student-led coalition threatens to upend Serbia’s political landscape as the EU-candidate country heads to the polls on Sunday
Serbia’s 6.5 million voters go to the polls on 25 October in a watershed parliamentary election characterised by civil unrest, a new political landscape, allegations of irregularities, an uncertain outcome and the potential of far-reaching consequences.
Here is a brief guide to the key issues.
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© Photograph: Pierre Crom/Getty Images
© Photograph: Pierre Crom/Getty Images
© Photograph: Pierre Crom/Getty Images
For years, Serbia’s opposition has struggled to turn public discontent into a credible challenge to Aleksandar Vučić’s political dominance. On Sunday (25 October), a student-led movement that began with demands for accountability after a deadly train station collapse will attempt to do what established opposition forces have repeatedly failed to achieve: translate civic mobilisation into political change.
The upcoming parliamentary elections are about more than the (re)distribution of seats. They represent the endeavour citizens want and need in a democratic society.
For several years now, “the students operate according to the principles of direct democracy,” senior research associate at the University of Belgrade, Vasiljević told EUobserver. They gather in “plenums” and make collective decisions.
The motor behind that movement was anger. The lack of accountability after the collapse of a canopy at Novi Sad railway station on 1 November 2024, which killed 16 people was the main trigger.
Since then, protests have been taken place around in the country. Eventually, they grew into a nationwide challenge to the government. The student movement even marched from Belgrade to Brussels and Strasbourg to appeal to the EU institutions.
“It brought some irreversible changes that will have a lasting impact on society,” said Vasiljević.
And these changes could be now transposed into politics. “The country has been held captive for far too long by one ruling party and, in fact, one ruling elite,” Miloje Savić, a volunteering poll observer, told EUobserver.
For many Serbs, as for Savić, the students’ organisation represent “a tectonic shift in how society is organised and how it should function.”
The Student List, now the electoral vehicle for the mobilisation, has given people frustrated with established politics a new focus for their demands. The main idea being that political participation can be rebuilt from the ground up.
“It is not a good time to be living in Serbia. And during my life, I can’t remember a time when it was,” Ivan Bartoš, a 31-year-old organiser of student protests in Bački Petrovac told EUobserver.
Serbia, as many European countries, is suffering from an ageing population. It brings to the social debate a generational difference. On one side, the middle-aged and “corrupted” regime led by Vučić, on the other, a proposal of change without real political experience.
And the question that is heard in the run-up to the elections is “does Serbia need a professional politician who has been trained for years in kleptocracy, or is society willing to take a risk?”
Yet the movement’s rise has exposed a fundamental tension: society may be changing faster than the institutions through which change must be delivered.
“The institutions have been captured and controlled by the regime. There is not enough institutional space to accommodate these political changes,” Vasiljević said.
Previous Serbian elections have been accompanied by allegations of vote-buying, voter intimidation and ballot-box stuffing. After the last ones, held in December 2023, European MP’s called for “independent investigations into the irregularities”.
Knowing what is at stake, the Student List is trained an unprecedented number of poll monitors (15,000), seeking to protect the vote and document potential irregularities.
Attacks on opposition representatives by groups of unidentified men dressed in black have repeatedly raised concerns during the rule of Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS).
The media are not safe either.
This article continues, but the full version is available only to EUobserver.com subscribers. Visit account.euobserver.com/membership
Each country’s protesters have distinct grievances. Listen to them, not the voices telling us Europe is ungovernable
Last Saturday night, the town hall of Limoges in west-central France was set ablaze. By Sunday, images of the fire destroying a symbol of the French republic, and other scenes of unrest across France, were everywhere, but being used to tell very different stories about what is happening in Europe.
For some, the flames announced a pan-European youth revolt, proof that a single movement was sweeping the continent. Donald Trump, who had already insisted that the French schools protests were not about schools but about migration and Islam, urged Europeans to “close the borders”. The mayor of Limoges saw the fingerprints of an alleged ultra-left insurrection.
Alberto Alemanno is the Jean Monnet professor of EU law at HEC Paris and the founder of The Good Lobby
France readers Q&A: Guardian Europe columnists Rokhaya Diallo and Alexander Hurst will be live taking questions from our readers about the unrest in France from at 1500 BST / 1600 CEST on Friday 23 October. Send your questions by email now to conversations@theguardian.com or post questions in the comments from 0900 BST here.
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© Photograph: Aurélien Morissard/AP
© Photograph: Aurélien Morissard/AP
© Photograph: Aurélien Morissard/AP
Serbia's upcoming parliamentary elections on October 25 have been rocked by so-called "student protests" in the runup to Sunday's voting, and USAID funding is still flowing to an organization supporting opponents of Aleksandar Vučić.
The post Biden-Era USAID Grant Still Funding Leftist Protests in Serbia Ahead of Elections appeared first on Breitbart.
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