A gen Z protest movement could be about to oust Serbia’s strongman. Here’s why that will shake Europe | Misha Glenny

History may not be about to repeat itself in Serbia, but it is beginning to rhyme. Just over a quarter of a century ago, Serbian citizens turned out to vote in large numbers to inflict a historic defeat on the then strongman in Belgrade, Slobodan Milošević, who was seeking re-election as president. He lost despite his extensive control over the media, the judiciary and the security forces. When he was reluctant to leave office, Serbs poured on to the streets in their hundreds of thousands, finally forcing him to go.

On Sunday, a new generation could have the decisive voice in an equally fateful election, this time for the national parliament. Today’s strongman, Aleksandar Vučić, recently resigned as president to fight the election with the aim of swapping the locus of power from the presidency to the prime minister’s office.

But Vučić, who has been in almost total control of Serbia for 14 years, finds himself on the back foot for the first time since he assumed power, just as Milošević did in 2000. Like his close friend, Viktor Orbán, who was decisively beaten in elections earlier this year, Vučić has felt compelled to pull out all the stops to halt the opposition electoral coalition, known as the Student List (SL).

Unlike Orbán’s Fidesz party, Vučić’s Serbian Progressive party (SNS) is unlikely to be humiliated in Sunday’s vote. Opinion polls vary widely – some giving the SL a lead of almost 10 percentage points, others suggesting the race is neck and neck. Pollsters also suggest that the higher the turnout, the greater the chances for the opposition. Some fear that the aftermath could even be violent.

Vučić is throwing the kitchen sink at the campaign to skew the result his way. He has tightened his grip on the media by supporting a change in ownership of what was until recently the most important independent news group, United Media. Last weekend, 10 prominent journalists from its most important outlet, the TV station N1, resigned in protest against senior editorial appointments believed to favour Vučić and the SNS.

N1 had been key in reporting the rapid rise in support for the student protest movement since it emerged spontaneously in November 2024. Students first took to the streets when the canopy over the main rail station in Novi Sad in the north of Serbia collapsed, killing 16 people. The tragedy occurred just months after a Chinese consortium had finished renovating it in what critics claim was a corrupt deal.

At first, Vučić’s response was to wait until the demonstrations petered out. But despite various attempts to coerce the students to retreat from the streets, the protests grew throughout 2025 and 2026. In March 2025, during a 15-minute period of silence to honour the victims of the Novi Sad disaster, protesters alleged that police deployed a sonic weapon, the US-made LRAD 450XL, causing the crowd to disperse in panic. The government denied the use of the weapon and later the interior ministry filed a criminal complaint against one military analyst over his claim that a sonic weapon was probably used.

The demonstrations have showed no sign of letting up in the past two years. The big challenge facing the students was how to channel the undoubted energy they generated through the movement into a coherent political force capable of challenging Vučić. The old opposition parties were riven by factionalism and lacking dynamic leadership. But this summer the students announced they had selected candidates to stand in a new formation, the Student List, including prominent academics, engineers, workers, cultural figures and students. Their straightforward slogan is “Serbia or the mafia”.

Vučić has responded to the challenge by cranking up the nationalist rhetoric in recent months in order to mobilise the far right. He has welcomed the support of his neighbour, Milorad Dodik, the de facto leader of Republika Srpska, the Serbian entity in Bosnia. Dodik has long been regarded as Vladimir Putin’s main man in the Balkans and more recently has cosied up to Donald Trump, whose associates are investing in a gas pipeline with his help.

Vučić, too, has been cultivating support from Moscow. Personal relations between Putin and the Serbian leader have been strained in the past. Vučić has been supplying Ukraine with a significant amount of munitions while playing his complex game of trying to balance friendly relationships with the west and Russia.

But with the gloves off, the Serbian leader has become less coy. Another sign of how seriously he views the students’ challenge was his decision to allow the recent nationalist jamboree of a state funeral for the man known as the “Butcher of Bosnia”, convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić, with the aim of bolstering his support among nationalists.

If despite all this the Student List emerges victorious at the election, the shock waves will be felt as powerfully across Europe as they were when Orbán was defeated.

Above all, it opens the possibility of a swifter integration with the European Union, a move that would be welcomed not just in Brussels but in London as well. Successive British governments are concerned that the Balkans represents the soft underbelly of European defence where Russia can exert significant pressure. Since Brexit, Britain’s influence here is limited politically but it has been active in promoting security cooperation across the region, with Nato and the EU.

Student activists and their supporters have been disappointed by an apparent indifference on the part of the EU to their political struggle and a general perception in the outside world that Serbia’s democracy is a lost cause. On Sunday, they aim to prove them wrong.

• Misha Glenny is a former central Europe correspondent for the Guardian and the BBC