After fourteen years, Aleksandar Vučić’s right wing authoritarian regime is gone. He conceded defeat in the general election less than two hours after the close of the ballot. This came as a surprise to many as big police contingents were gathering around the parliament building and other key centres of power in the capital Belgrade. But this time the opponent was simply too strong for Vučić to attempt to rig the vote, claim victory and use force. The opposition Student List (SL) was set up by the student movement that began exactly two years ago. The Student List won with 52% and a 13% lead.
The student movement began after the collapse of a concrete canopy at the railway station in the city of Novi Sad, in November 2024, killing sixteen people. It was the consequence of dodgy contracts, shabby work and profiteering. The student protests that followed quickly became the strongest movement that the country had seen for decades. It was grassroots, democratically organised in student plenums (assemblies), where students made decisions about university blockades, organised huge protests in the cities and towns, and marched between the towns, visiting villages and talking to rural populations who otherwise had limited access to information.
Widely embraced as a hopeful and reinvigorating force, the movement began mending deep-seated wounds stemming from the post-Yugoslavia era and civil war, years marked by hardship, dashed expectations, and widespread public cynicism. Student plenums inspired neighbourhoods to also organise in assemblies, taking initiatives in local and national issues.
Vučić’s regime was badly shaken by the student movement but it didn’t fall. This is because the most powerful force was missing, the organised working class. Students called on workers to join them in strikes many times but although many workers supported the students and attended protests as ordinary citizens, apart from teachers no other section of organised workers took action. This was in many cases due to fear of losing jobs, especially in the public sector where jobs were dependent on the support of the ruling clique, and due to close ties between some union leaders with the regime.
There was a limit to how long the student movement could be sustained in this situation. They were aware of their strength but also lacked a decisive weapon against the regime. The only option left, they concluded, was to demand an early general election. Previously, Vučić had been extremely keen on elections, calling them every year simply because he was addicted to winning (by any means), believing in his own invincibility and irreplaceability. But not this time. It took almost a year and a half before he finally called the election.
The students’ decision to direct the movement into an electoral battle was risky. If they had lost it would have been difficult to see how to carry on. Many on the left correctly saw a danger in limiting an essentially anti-establishment movement into the framework of parliamentary politics. But once the election was called it was correct to give support to the Student List, even if conditional. As it happens, the students have, potentially, made history; never before a grassroot student movement stood in an election and won. However, they will only make history if the electoral win results in profound systemic changes, brought about in and out of the parliament.
The student List was entirely created by students but did not have any student candidates on it. It fielded 250 candidates, as is the number of seats in the parliament. The majority are university lecturers, scientists and farmers (several known anti-lithium mining activists), and workers. The ideological mix is wide, as it is among students themselves.
In a period of low class consciousness and general political confusion in most countries that has lasted for decades since the fall of the Berlin wall and the “triumph of capitalism”, the alternative to the capitalist system is still difficult for many to see, although that is changing, at least among youth who indicate support for some type of ‘socialism’, in many countries.
It is the same in Serbia, and this is certainly a disadvantage for the student List but there are a few important factors. The SL stood against what is seen as a corrupt regime that was enriching themselves while working people are among the poorest in Europe. The regime gave away resources to foreign mining companies while bullying the local population, and advertised workers as cheap labour to foreign companies, all of which is essentially the behaviour of a government that serves foreign big capital. Any struggle to defend homes from mining, or a struggle for higher wages, is a battle against big capitalist interests, even if not seen as such at that point.
The program of SL has many progressive commitments, like raising all wages including the minimum wage, limiting temporary contracts to twelve months, paid maternity leave, making strikes easier to organise, including a general strike, the protection of the environment, bans on privatisation of water, stopping further privatisations of public assets, good relations with the neighbouring countries, solidarity with all oppressed peoples, notably Palestinians (Vučić was a close Netanyahu ally and partner in arms trade), and more.
This has to be welcomed by the Left even though the programme of SL and its candidates and many students are not openly, or indeed consciously anti-capitalist. Any attempt to put the programme into practice will result in confrontation with big capital, foreign and domestic. It will be a learning curve. Corruption, bullying, and profiteering is part of the capitalist system that rules in most corners of the world. Vučić didn’t attempt to resist the diktat of big capital and its institutions; he acted as its manager while enriching himself and his cronies, while ruthlessly suppressing discontent.
New government’s tasks
The job of the new government will be difficult, in unravelling the extent of the corruption of the previous regime, and in implementing any progressive changes. But it can be done if backed by the student movement, and much wider, most importantly, by organised workers who should now feel more confident. It will help that a miner (from still a state-owned mine whose workers were instrumental in toppling Milošević) who opposed Vučić’s regime and who fought against the corrupt leadership of his trade union, was on the SL list and will become an MP.
The election in Serbia happened at the same time as students and young people are protesting all over Europe. There have been some reports of solidarity messages between them, and of exchange of ideas with the Albanian students involved in mass protests.
It is important for young people in the Balkans to realise that they all have the same enemy, which is the capitalist system itself. The example of the French students should show to both Serbians and Albanians that the system doesn’t provide good education and a decent life even in the “developed” capitalist countries.
It is still remarkable that most Serbian students never showed any pro-EU leaning; they refused to carry EU flags and distanced themselves from the pro-EU official opposition (or any other opposition). This is quite unique for a country that is not a member of the EU, where a pro-democracy movement is fighting against an authoritarian regime. The reasons are partly historical. NATO’s bombing of Serbia in the 1990s and the remaining anti-Western powers’ sentiment, and more recent EU attempt at getting lithium from Serbia that would’ve resulted in horrific pollution and trampling on human rights, are all key factors explaining the attitude of most Serbs towards the EC. The pro-EU opposition party got 0.3% of the vote. Even though this election was seen as a referendum between the students and Vučić and many people didn’t want to risk wasting their vote, this is still an incredibly low result for the pro EU party.
It is positive that Serbian people, in general, have no illusions in the EU, which is a bosses’ club. This anti Western capitalist mood needs to be channelled into developing a programme for a democratically managed planned economy in Serbia, to stop the exploitative foreign “investments”, re-nationalise the industries looted after the break up of Yugoslavia and the disastrous restoration of capitalism.
There is a general feeling that the people have ‘got their country back’, where young people want to stay and build their lives. But under capitalism no country belongs to its people because workers don’t have a say, at all, in a privatised economy. Students had a chance to learn some of this during plenums, where they also organised political talks and debates. According to one report, a fifth of all active students are on the Left, which is very promising. It is important that the student movement, as well as neighbourhood assemblies, continue to self-organise separately from parliamentary politics, to act as a strong lever on the new government, demanding pro-student, pro-farmer and pro-worker policies, and also to continue to develop as separate political forces. Genuinely independent trade unions, democratically run and combative, need to be forged.
Most importantly, a party of the working class with a strong base in workplaces, communities, universities, colleges, and schools, with bold socialist policies that can make a class appeal to small farmers and middle classes and can also appeal to the wider Balkans working class, needs to be urgently built to ensure the potential of the mass struggles are realised.
The next chapter in Serbian politics is going to be very challenging but also offering big opportunities.