Serbia’s largest student movement in decades is challenging President Vučić’s grip on power, demanding accountability and new elections amid violent crackdowns and waning EU criticism
It’s the middle of summer, 36°C. Many people are on vacation, and only a few tourists wander through Belgrade’s city centre. But the calm is deceptive. As Philine Bickhardt reports in the Swiss newspaper Republik, the country is in a state of emergency. Since a railway station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in November 2024, killing 16 people, protests have not stopped.
Students are protesting against the increasingly authoritarian President Aleksandar Vučić, demanding new elections. It is the largest student movement since May 1968, which also swept through Yugoslavia but quickly ended after a conciliatory speech by the socialist leader Josip Broz Tito. Now, the numbers of youth on the barricades are soaring, at times exceeding 300,000 participants, as in March 2025.
The entire university is “under total occupation.” Classes are suspended, and students hold their plenary meetings outside. For months, teachers across the country, from primary schools to universities, were on strike, returning only under government pressure. Still, students continue to occupy nearly all faculties, sleeping inside and controlling the entrances.
In March, the government cut professors’ salaries and threatened to withdraw funding. By early June, the professors gave in and agreed to resume teaching, a decision many students now support, Bickhardt writes. Months of protest have left them exhausted and financially strained. For those paying privately, between €800 and €2,500 a year, losing a year of study is hard.
When Translator visited the Faculty of Philosophy, the building was plastered with posters, one reading blokada ako ne sada (“blockade if not now, when?”). Elsewhere in the city, we spoke with a young student planning to leave Serbia for studies in Ljubljana. While it is quiet now, he said, the protests will resume after the summer break.
At the outset, students had four demands: the release of all documentation of the railway station collapse, an investigation into violence against students, the dismissal of charges against unlawfully detained protesters, and an increase in the education budget to 20 per cent.
Previously, the students had avoided addressing President Vučić directly, cheekily using the informal “ti” in their slogan “You’re not in charge.” Now, the protests target him openly: under the constitution, Bickhardt explains, only the president can dissolve parliament and call elections.
Arrests and trials were already underway. Sociology teacher Marija Vasić was detained for two months before starting a hunger strike. Then, on the night of 28-29 June, police violence escalated sharply. Over the next nine days, around 1,400 protests and blockades erupted across the country. More than 500 people were arrested, many held for days before facing trial.
Vučić pardoned the “thugs” who had attacked peaceful students after their detention and trial. Among them were men who broke a female student’s jaw in Novi Sad and a driver who deliberately rammed a roadblock, injuring student Kristina Vasiljević. The EU’s response to the crackdown was slow, avoiding explicit criticism of Vučić.
Press freedom is under severe threat, says journalist Marija Šehić, who had been dismissed from Euronews for alleged “careless or negligent work” and “disciplinary violations.” Serbia ranks 96th out of 180 in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders.
Bickhardt doesn’t hold back in her critique of the protest movement, diagnosing a problematic shift to nationalist rhetoric. The students chose June 28 for a major protest, a date charged with patriotic symbolism. It commemorates the 1389 Battle of Kosovo which Serbian nationalists use as a founding myth to claim Kosovo. The choice was not accidental; speeches from the day repeatedly invoked the defense of “Christian Europe” against the “Islamic Orient.”
There’s even some far-right activists involved, invoking “Serbian integralism” and the idea of a “Greater Serbia”. The student who read out the movement’s demands also spoke of Kosovo’s “betrayal”, a term used by Vučić himself, echoing Slobodan Milošević, who in 1989 gave a nationalistic speech in Kosovo on the same date, foreshadowing the 1990s wars.
Bickhardt argues that this “opening to the right” was meant to broaden the base for new elections but ultimately risks aligning the movement with Vučić’s own nationalist rhetoric while fuelling ethnic tension. To make matters worse, feminist groups have spoken out against sexism in the movement. Emilija Milenković, a political science student, points out that on 28 June almost all speeches were by men, despite women leading many protests and blockades.
Bickhardt concludes that the movement’s initial diversity has given way to conformity. The movement’s future remains uncertain, but the country has already changed. Old fears are gone, and with new students arriving this autumn, the revolutionary spark might be lit again.
Philine Bickhardt is a research assistant at the Slavic Department of the University of Zurich.
Original article (“Protest zwischen Aufbruch und Rückschritt”) by Philine Bickhardt was first published in German on 1 August 2025.
It’s available here.
Republik is Swiss online news magazine.
Summary by IJ.
