Serbia’s student revolution: from principled protest to power

This weekend it will be two years since the collapse of a shoddily constructed train station canopy in Serbia’s second-largest city, Novi Sad. The tragedy, killing 16 people, was swiftly attributed to state corruption and failures of regulation, sparking student-led protests across the country.

Some of those demonstrators dared to imagine that they could become the catalyst for a democratic revolution.

On Sunday, that was more or less what happened. After sustaining their protests and turning them into a political movement, the students resoundingly defeated former Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic’s autocratic government in a snap legislative poll called by the president himself. Their victory constitutes one of the most remarkable election outcomes in recent European history.

For well over a decade Vucic and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) have exerted a domineering grip over civil society and the media, ruling through a combination of cronyism, patronage and bullying authoritarianism. As a report by international observers confirmed on Monday, the Serbian government made full, unscrupulous use of such tactics to ensure there was no level playing field for the vote. That it was nevertheless routed by a leaderless movement of 20- and 30-somethings would have been noted across a continent in which youth protest is challenging political priorities.

As in Hungary, where a focus on corruption helped the opposition to unseat former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban after 16 years in office, the students’ campaign for basic democratic renewal struck a deeper chord than perhaps even they thought possible. Posing the choice for voters as “Serbia or mafia?” they put forward a student list of civic candidates dominated by academics, but also featuring farmers and well-known athletes. A turnout of almost 70 percent — the highest in a Serbian election since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992 — delivered them a comfortable majority.

What comes next will necessarily be an experiment in doing things differently. By standing apart from established structures of politics, the student insurgents embodied a freshness of approach and won the trust of the public — including in rural areas presumed to be bastions of Vucic support. In the immediate future, the new government is likely to function as a kind of constituent assembly, dedicated primarily to cleaning up civil society and rolling back the abuses that saw Serbia plunge toward the bottom of European corruption rankings.

Politically, the priority would be to consolidate this domestic agenda by winning the forthcoming presidential election. which is due by late December. However, in the longer term there would be less straightforward debates to be had. Vucic’s defeat is good news for the western Balkans as a whole, where he has been a consistently disruptive presence. However, on foreign policy issues such as joining the EU and relations with Russia, opinion across the student movement is divided.

As a new government seeks to re-establish the rule of law and a properly functioning and accountable state, Brussels must do all it can to assist that process while outlining a plausible and attractive path to EU membership. Vucic’s Serbia, like Orban’s Hungary, became a soft autocracy where power was so entrenched that it was hard to imagine how it could be dislodged. However, now there are new and better possibilities. In extraordinary fashion, the students’ inspiring journey from principled protest to power has shown just what the art of politics can deliver.