Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia's dominant political figure for more than a decade, conceded defeat on Sunday night in snap parliamentary elections, handing power to a leaderless coalition of student activists who built their campaign from two years of street protest.
"We still do not have final results … it is clear that we have lost these elections," Vučić told supporters at the headquarters of his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) in Belgrade late on Sunday. Preliminary figures from Serbia's election commission showed turnout of 64.9% by two hours before polls closed — a record that commentators had said would favor the challengers.
Two years of protest, one snap election
Vučić called the early vote after two years of demonstrations triggered by the collapse of a train-station canopy in Novi Sad in November 2024, which killed 16 people and became a national symbol of corruption and negligence in public works. The president had already served the maximum two terms allowed under Serbia's constitution and was seeking to return to the post of prime minister, a role he held until 2017, by leading the SNS back into government.
Running against him was the Student List, a coalition with no formal leader that drew candidates from across Serbian civil society — doctors, academics, actors and sports figures — rather than career politicians. Its platform centered on purging officials implicated in the Novi Sad collapse, ending political interference in state enterprises and freeing Serbia's public broadcaster from government control.
Celebrations in the streets
News of Vučić's concession set off scenes of celebration across Serbia. In Belgrade, crowds danced in the streets, car horns sounded and fireworks lit the sky above Slavija Square. "Serbia is free," one student told the BBC. "It's a miracle."
No force can forever overpower a people who have decided to take their destiny into their own hands.
Radomir Šaičić, Student List candidate
Ilija Srdanović, the Student List's most prominent candidate, told BBC Serbian that the movement hoped to "free the country from tyranny" and promised, simply, "this will be a free state." In Novi Sad itself — the city where the tragedy that triggered the protests occurred — residents told reporters they believed "everything is going to get better now."
What comes next
Serbia's 250-seat parliament will now have to seat a bloc of newcomers with little governing experience and no single leader, a structure designed explicitly to avoid replicating the strongman politics the movement rose up against. Vučić and the SNS have consistently denied the corruption allegations that fueled the protests. During his time in power, Vučić pursued Serbia's long-stalled candidacy for European Union membership while declining to join Western sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, and had promised further increases to pensions and public-sector pay had he won.
Final, certified results are expected in the coming days, and the shape of the next government — and whether it can hold together a coalition without a defined leadership structure — will be the first test of whether Sunday's result translates into durable change.
