For nearly two years Serbia’s student protesters have occupied lecture halls, blocked roads and filled city squares. Now they are trying something rather harder: turning a movement without a conventional leader into a political organisation capable of running a country.
On September 14, the students submitted a list of 250 candidates for the snap parliamentary election on October 25. The list was subsequently certified by Serbia’s electoral commission with 69,099 valid signatures, nearly seven times the legal threshold of 10,000.
It is the clearest sign yet that the movement that emerged in the form of anti-corruption protests after the collapse of the Novi Sad railway-station canopy in November 2024 has the potential to move from the streets into electoral politics.
Its central promise is deliberately broad: change the way Serbia is governed.
The list, called Students’ List—Students Win, is headed not by a veteran opposition politician but by Ilija Srdanović, a cardiologist and professor at the University of Novi Sad who was little known outside academic and medical circles before the protests.
Srdanović has twice declined President Aleksandar Vučić's invitation to a televised debate, including an offer to meet on the independent broadcasters N1 or Nova S, saying he would speak to people who “have something to say and know something”.
Behind Srdanović are doctors, professors, engineers, artists, farmers and activists. Among the better-known candidates are Dejan Bodiroga, the former basketball star and current president of the EuroLeague, former National Bank of Serbia governor Dejan Šoškić, actor Tihomir Stanić and former athlete Mihail Dudaš.
The students say candidates were chosen through plenums and collective decision-making rather than by party leaders. They reject the idea of building the movement around a single figure, saying parliamentary mandates should be treated as public work rather than political prizes.
That puts the list at some distance from Serbia’s established party system, where political organisations have been closely identified with their leaders.
The ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) is running under the banner Aleksandar Vučić—United Serbia, putting the president at the top of its list as he prepares to leave the presidency and seek the prime minister’s job.
Vučić is followed by Miloš Vučević, the SNS president and former prime minister, and Ana Brnabić, parliament speaker and former prime minister. The ticket also includes doctors, professors, artists, athletes and students, among them violinist Jovan Kolundžija, actors Branislav Lečić and Lidija Vukićević, former basketball player Željko Rebrača and Miloš Pavlović, a student who organised pro-government rallies.
The wider governing camp contains a generation of ministers and senior officials with years of experience in government, including Siniša Mali, Zlatibor Lončar, Marko Đurić and Bratislav Gašić, although they are not among the 250 parliamentary candidates.
The student movement is bringing people into electoral politics who have worked outside the political establishment, while the governing camp can draw on a deep pool of politicians and officials accustomed to running ministries and state institutions.
That difference is central to the argument the students are making about how Serbia should be governed — and to the questions they will face if they win seats.
From protest to programme
The students have tried to demonstrate that they are offering more than an anti-Vučić campaign. Their 11-point programme is divided into three broad sections: “Serbia or the Mafia”, “Knowledge is Power” and “Serbia Grows With Us”.
Much of it concerns the institutions that protesters say contributed to the Novi Sad disaster. The students propose greater independence for prosecutors and judges, scrutiny of politicians’ wealth, investigations into corruption, greater transparency in public procurement and audits of major infrastructure projects. They also want to reform the media regulator and public broadcaster.
The economic programme includes support for start-ups, domestic businesses and farmers, closer links between universities and employers, competitive appointments to state-owned companies, cheaper medicines and affordable housing. Other proposals include free school textbooks and restrictions on the use of fixed-term employment contracts.
It is a programme focused more on repairing institutions than on radically remaking the economy. There is also relatively little detail on some of the questions that have long divided Serbian politics, including relations with the European Union, Russia and China, Kosovo, energy security and public finances.
That breadth and ambiguity reflect the coalition the students have assembled. The movement has brought together university professors, farmers, artists, liberals, nationalists and people who had previously stayed away from politics. Avoiding positions on issues that could divide that coalition may help preserve it; it could also become harder once parliamentary politics forces decisions on specific policies.
A crowded opposition
The students are not the only opposition force on the ballot. Several established opposition parties have backed the movement rather than fielding their own candidates. These include the Democratic Party, the Green-Left Front, the Movement of Free Citizens and other opposition groups.
But the opposition remains fragmented. A pro-European coalition comprising the Freedom and Justice Party, Serbia Centre and the Solidarity movement is running separately under the name European Serbia. A right-wing alliance of the New Democratic Party of Serbia and the Monarchists is also contesting the election under the banner Authentic Right.
The student movement has therefore entered an electoral field in which it is both an alternative to the established opposition and dependent on some of its support.
The government, by contrast, has a political organisation built over years. The SNS has a nationwide network, established campaign infrastructure and politicians with experience in government.
The students have demonstrated a different kind of organisational capacity: mass mobilisation, local networks and the ability to collect tens of thousands of signatures in a short period.
The experience question
Vučić has already made the students’ lack of ideology and governing experience a central line of attack. He has accused them of lacking political experience and a clear vision for Serbia, arguing that running the state is too serious to be entrusted to people without experience in government.
The composition of the student list offers a different definition of expertise.
A doctor, a university professor or an engineer may have spent years managing complex organisations and making decisions with significant consequences, but that experience is not the same as running a ministry or negotiating a state budget.
The movement has also deliberately avoided appointing a conventional political leader. That has helped it maintain a collective identity during the protests, but government would bring different demands: negotiating coalitions, choosing ministers, managing a bureaucracy and resolving disagreements among people who may share a desire for institutional change without sharing the same views on everything else.
Those questions have so far remained largely hypothetical. The movement's immediate objective has been simpler: turn the energy of the protests into votes.
