How student assemblies brought down the Serbian government

Almost two years ago, a concrete canopy at a freshly renovated railway station in Serbia’s second city of Novi Sad collapsed. The falling canopy, which the country’s protest movement has blamed on widespread corruption, killed 16 people. Now, it has brought the country’s ruling party down with it.

Serbia’s right-wing populist president Aleksandar Vucic conceded defeat in the country’s parliamentary elections on Sunday. Just who exactly he has conceded to remains harder to judge. The force that won the popular vote, and a clear majority of parliamentary seats, is not a traditional opposition party – or any kind of party at all.

Instead, the seats will be filled by candidates belonging to the Student List, a collection of little-known academics, economists, athletes, engineers, artists and activists chosen by majority vote by the nameless student assemblies that have sprung up in the universities occupied by demonstrators for almost two years.

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These plenums, as they are known, have served as the guiding hand of a protest movement that has brought tens of thousands of people into the streets to overturn what demonstrators described as a culture of corruption and cronyism that had taken root under 14 years of Vucic’s increasingly authoritarian rule. Now, it falls upon them to determine which of the candidates will serve as Serbia’s next prime minister and which will run the country's ministries. 

All power to the plenums

London-based political scientist Branislav Radeljic said that the student assemblies had been crucial in channelling the public fury unleashed by the Novi Sad collapse.

“The student plenums helped turn mass mobilisation into institutional change through collective decision-making, decentralisation and a deliberately broad agenda,” he said. “Organised at individual faculties, the assemblies allowed students to debate demands, agree on tactics and vote on key decisions. This created a sense of shared ownership and legitimacy, while requiring activists to justify proposals to their peers rather than defer to a single leader.”

You don’t have to go all the way back to the Petrograd Soviet to find precedents. Nebojsa Vladisavljevic, a professor in Serbian politics at the University of Belgrade, said that these experiments in direct democracy had been a staple of student protest movements across the Balkans for years.

“This horizontal model of organisation, highly decentralised, is not that novel when it comes to this region – students have organised themselves in this particular way via public assemblies, or plenums as they call them, for probably about two decades now,” he said. “And that includes Belgrade students, but also students in Zagreb, Croatia, Sarajevo and Tuzla in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Skopje in North Macedonia.”

Read moreWhy has the EU kept silent on Serbia’s massive protest movement?

Students have served as the vanguard of Serbia’s protest movement since November 2024, when suspected ruling party supporters set upon a silent vigil organised by students and teachers at Belgrade’s Faculty of Dramatic Arts. The students swiftly occupied the building, setting off a wave of university blockades that shut down classes across the country.

“The protest spread out widely,” Vladisavljevic said. “All faculties or schools of all state universities were under blockade for several months, and during this period, students made all their decisions in these plenary sessions and working groups on all sorts of issues.”

Behind closed doors

The rules are simple. Every student has the right to participate in plenary sessions. In occupied university buildings across the country, students put forward proposals to be debated by their peers, often over multiple sessions. Decisions pass by majority vote.

Ana Jovic-Lazic, a senior research fellow at the Institute of International Politics and Economics, said that the plenums had been crucial in building trust both within and without the growing student movement.

“In a political environment where parties are often strongly identified with individual leaders, the students offered a different way of organising and making decisions,” she said. “The emphasis on collective decision-making gave participants a sense of ownership and responsibility. It also helped the movement maintain its independence from established political parties, which was particularly important given the widespread distrust of traditional political actors.”

By deliberately casting itself as a leaderless force, Vladisavljevic said the student movement was also shielding itself from being singled out for slander by a media that has been tightly controlled by the ruling Serbian Progressive Party.

“It has to do with the nature of regime that we had in Serbia for about 10 or so years – which is not just authoritarian, but also personalist, and which is based not purely on repression, but is specifically on media manipulation,” he said. “They specialised in targeting a prominent opposition personalities and government critics. And in that way, they successfully undermined opposition in previous years.”

Eric Gordy, professor of political and cultural sociology at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, said that the lack of public-facing figures had made the student movement more difficult to undermine than its predecessors. 

“It's a leaderless movement, which in terms of the media environment where there is a constant effort to try to discredit movements of opposition, they become a much more difficult target – they’re a moving target,” he said. “You can't discredit the movement by concentrating on a personality and defaming them.”

Direct action

Unwilling to let the traditional broadcast media set the narrative, students instead organised their own outreach to the wider public, holding public rallies and marathon cycling trips across the country to connect directly with communities outside the major cities.

Students also called on people across Serbia to set up their own local assemblies, or zborovi, to spread their experiment in direct democracy off campus. Scores of these assemblies have sprung up across the country since March – though their painstakingly debated demands have had little success in eking concessions from local government officials.

“What I find especially significant is that the students managed to connect their demands with concerns shared by people well beyond the universities,” Jovic-Lazic said. “Their insistence on accountability and functioning institutions resonated with a much broader public.”

Read moreSerbia’s student-led protesters wanted accountability. Now they’re calling for elections

Having failed to secure its demands for accountability for the Novi Sad collapse through more than a year of mass street demonstrations, the student movement set its sights on more traditional organs of state power.

The movement began pushing for early elections, and a slate of parliamentary candidates began to emerge behind closed doors as the student assemblies voted and vetoed a list into shape.  

“By entering electoral politics and involving student assemblies in candidate selection, it sought to transfer collective authorisation into formal institutions,” Radeljic said. “The key test now is whether the decentralised practices that sustained mobilisation can also deliver accountability, coordination and effective government. Given the calibre of the people selected by the student movement, I believe they can.”

The mass line

The movement’s minimalist political programme has also played a core role in the Student List’s mass appeal.

The 11-point programme that emerged from the student assemblies combines a raft of targeted anti-corruption measures with broader social policies including providing young people with affordable housing and investing in rural healthcare.

While its supporters paint it as a blueprint for dismantling more than a decade of authoritarian control of the country’s judiciary, media and civil service, the programme deliberately steers clear of the thornier policy discussions that would reveal deep divides within the broad-church movement. 

Gordy said that the intentionally expansive outreach to people from every corner of the political spectrum meant that representatives from the radical left were rubbing shoulders with right-wing nationalists.

“There are at least three different currents within the student movement. You have one that's a radical democratic current that's saying, ‘Let's try to remake the society so that authoritarianism and corruption are eliminated and don't return’,” he said. “Second, you have a procedurally democratic group saying, ‘Let's try to establish rule of law, but basically our role is not political, and what we want to do is create the conditions for the political parties to take over.’"

“And then third, you've got a so-called ‘national group’ – that is, the ones who are more radical on these questions of relations with other states in the region than what has been,” he added. “They've sort of declared a truce in order to face the election, but they're going to be competing for power and control of the government now.”