After a year of street protests, Serbia’s students split on what should come next | Serbia

M.In the middle of the 16-day, 250-mile (400 km) march from Novi Pazar to Novi Sad, Inas Hodžić was still quite energetic. Like thousands of other Serbian students, he was heading towards the city that was the scene of a national tragedy last autumn.

16 people died when the newly renovated dome of Novi Sad’s main train station collapsed on November 1, 2024. The disaster, which critics say, revealed much more than faulty construction and sparked Serbia’s largest youth-led protest movement since the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević.

To begin with, the students’ anger was generalized; It was a howl of protest against a political system they saw as corrupt, oppressive and responsible for substandard renovations at the train station. But in recent months, a growing number of people have been sharpening their demands and calling for early parliamentary elections to create a new political class.

“First of all, if a new government cannot bring justice for the 16 victims of the canopy collapse, they will face the same fate as this government,” Hodžić, a student from the Muslim-majority city of Novi Pazar, said last week.

On Saturday, exactly one year after the disaster, he will join tens of thousands of people in Novi Sad for a demonstration aimed at telling Serbia’s authoritarian president Aleksandar Vučić that they are not going anywhere. The student-led movement says it has awakened the spirit of a generation that once believed politics was pointless, taking much of Serbian society with it.

But their dilemma is clear: despite constant involvement, Vučić remains in place; Presiding over a state apparatus largely controlled by his party, he is happy to call protesters “cowards and pathetic”. In the face of such inaction, students wonder where to go from here, and they don’t always agree with each other.

When they first met in democratic general assemblies last December to discuss tactics and strategy, the unity was built around a common refusal to engage with established political institutions. This principle, once a source of strength, has now become a clear breaking point.

These divisions became even more apparent last week when the European Parliament adopted a resolution seen as the harshest condemnation yet of Vučić’s government. While some welcomed the show of support, student protesters at the philosophy faculty in Novi Sad issued a statement against what they called “blatant attempts to co-opt the student movement.”

Another flashpoint within the movement is the demand for immediate elections. Proponents of the idea have begun to create an electoral list that they say will attract the attention of people from outside the country’s established party system.

A large segment of Serbian society supports this demand and calls on all opposition parties not to participate in the elections to show support for student candidates. Two opposition parties have already said they will do it.

Branislav Manojlović, who works for Serbia’s state electricity company, supports the election demand. “The system needs to be reset independently of political parties,” he said, “and this reset can occur through the student voter list, which will be guided not only by party interests but by the principles of justice, solidarity and empathy.”

But some students warn that entering the electoral arena risks diluting the movement’s original ideals. Siniša Cvetić, who participated in the blockades at Belgrade’s faculty of dramatic arts, believes it came too soon.

In recent months, authorities have detained scores of university students and other protesters who tried to crush the resistance. Police have been accused of violence against protesters, including beatings and arbitrary detentions. They deny the allegations.

“Students were tired; they were facing constant media manipulation, pressure and infiltration attempts,” Cvetić said. “The call for elections was imposed as an ‘inevitable next step’ but in essence it meant returning to the system we initially rejected.”

Instead, he argues, the focus should be on “developing structures of direct democracy and connecting with other sectors of society, such as workers and farmers.”

Others occupy a middle ground. Ivica Mladenović, member of the editorial board of the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, considers elections necessary but with limited potential.

“In an environment where institutions are taken over, elections become an area where the monopoly of power is questioned, at least symbolically,” he said. But, he added, this challenge “only makes sense if it is linked to the struggle to transform the social structure by fighting for autonomous unions, free education and independent media… If the electoral struggle turns into a struggle solely for change of government, it will lose its emancipatory potential.”

According to Jana Bacevic, professor of sociology and philosophy at Durham University, the demand for elections itself reveals the limitations of liberal democracy. “You can’t dislodge this system short of a violent revolution,” he said. “Serbia has only been displaced once in its history; not in 2000, but in 1944,” he added, referring to the communist Partisans who defeated the Nazi occupation.

While no one can agree on how to proceed with the political power amassed in the streets and blockades, there is near-unanimous agreement about what the movement has already accomplished.

“Students woke us up from our collective apathy. For the first time in decades, we felt like we had the power to create change, to take matters into our own hands,” Manojlović said.

Vučić has resisted calls for early elections, describing the protests as a coordinated campaign aimed at destabilizing Serbia and accusing western governments of interference without providing evidence. “Serbia is a democracy. Elections will be held before the 2027 deadline, as it has done consistently for over a decade, and in the meantime it is making progress on electoral reforms,” ​​he wrote in a letter to the Guardian in the summer.

Protesters vow not to give up. Manojlović said: “Students teach us how to fight for a more just society, because elections alone do not change everything. That is why we must preserve what the student movement has created: continuous civic participation. This is how we inherited the legacy of the student movement.”