SERBIA WATCH: What began as student demonstrations has become a nationwide civic uprising

For Serbia’s Gen Z protesters, the barricades are the beginning of a fight to reclaim the country’s institutions from a government they believe no longer deserves them.

As Serbia faces a summer of intensified protests in its civic uprising after the late June mass demonstration, where thousands raised phone flashlights in Belgrade’s Slavija Square, the country is becoming a theatre of balancing acts.

Students are evolving their tactics amid harsher police crackdowns, President Vučić is juggling repression and diplomacy, and the EU is unsure how hard to lean without tipping Serbia eastward.

Serbia’s protests began as vigils after a tragic infrastructure collapse in Novi Sad but have evolved into a nationwide civic uprising, led by students who organise through decentralised assemblies called plenaries.

The June 28 demonstration in Belgrade marked a turning point. Luka Mihajlović, beaten and arrested while standing calmly with hands raised, became a symbol of that shift.

His harsh treatment crystallised public anger and signalled the protests’ transformation from vigils into a nationwide civic uprising.

Vučić’s balancing acts

For Vučić, the crisis reveals just how precarious his foreign policy tightrope has become. He keeps Russia close while courting the EU, and every decision is filtered through Kosovo, Serbia’s most sensitive fault line.

Chinese investment and loans give him a stick to wave at Brussels when EU accession demands become uncomfortable, yet he is also hounded by nationalist hardliners at home who demand confrontation, not compromise.

Meanwhile, the Gen Z-led movement offers a glimpse of how future anti-illiberal resistance across Europe may be organised.

Tragedy that sparked the protests

On 1 November 2024, the canopy of Novi Sad’s main railway station collapsed onto commuters, killing 16 people.

The station had only recently been refurbished in a flagship infrastructure project involving Chinese contractors, and protesters quickly alleged that corruption and poor-quality work were to blame for the disaster.

What began as candlelight vigils quickly evolved: every day at 11:52 a.m., the exact time of the collapse, students and local residents blocked traffic in silence for 16 minutes, one minute for each life lost.

From vigils to occupations

In late November, tensions escalated when students at Belgrade’s Faculty of Dramatic Arts attempted a quiet tribute and were attacked by unidentified men, widely suspected to have links to Serbia’s ruling party.

The assault galvanised students nationwide. Universities became protest hubs, with dozens of campuses occupied.

Central to this decentralised mobilisation were plenaries, open assemblies where students debated tactics and made collective decisions.

For many international observers, this leaderless but disciplined structure offered a striking contrast to the rigid hierarchy of Serbian party politics.

A national movement

As winter turned to spring, the protests spread beyond university walls. Farmers and taxi drivers joined blockades. Teachers and doctors staged solidarity walkouts.

Protesters adopted a mix of tactics: flash-mob blockades, sit-ins at government buildings, and creative disruptions like playing volleyball at intersections in March.

Public support remained high: independent polling showed nearly 80% of citizens backed the protesters’ core demands, including calls for transparency over infrastructure contracts and protection of civil liberties.

Yet the movement faced growing repression. By May, isolated clashes with riot police became more frequent.

Turning point

The turning point came on 28 June 2025, when around 140,000 demonstrators gathered in Belgrade, and police tactics shifted dramatically toward mass arrests and heavy use of force.

The case of Luka Mihajlović, a student from Novi Sad, drew widespread attention. He was reportedly thrown to the ground and beaten by police despite standing calmly with his hands raised.

His injuries required hospitalisation, but before surgery a judge ordered him detained without a hearing. When his mother arrived, she found him handcuffed to his hospital bed. In the days that followed, spontaneous road blockades erupted in towns across Serbia.

Protesters adapted again, adopting what they called an “outsmarting” tactic. When police arrived, they simply relocated or sat quietly, forcing police to stand guard over empty intersections in the summer heat.

As their tactics evolved, so too did their demands: what began as calls for accountability over the Novi Sad collapse expanded into demands for police restraint, prosecution of those who attacked protesters, freedom for detainees, and ultimately snap parliamentary elections.

Many students also voiced frustration at Vučić’s long rule since 2014 and the corruption they see as a defining feature of his government, making their uprising as much about the system’s decay as the immediate trigger.

“We are here today because we cannot take it any more,” said Darko Kovacevic, a student addressing the crowd during.

Serbia’s civic uprising was now national in scale, decentralised in form, and determined to endure.

The government’s contradictions

Since coming to power in 2014, President Aleksandar Vučić has consolidated authority through increasingly illiberal means, capturing key institutions and media while tightening control over parliament and security services.

His government is now facing its most serious domestic challenge in over a decade. Vučić has refused demands for snap elections, insisting Serbia will hold parliamentary polls only in 2026 or 2027.

He continues to present himself as a pragmatic statesman committed to order and international partnership, though in reality he has increasingly slid into authoritarianism while selectively engaging the EU.

As Ivanka Popović, the former president of the University of Belgrade, put it, "what began as outrage over political repression and corruption has escalated into a nationwide demand for change… the regime’s long ties to criminal groups and media control make it deeply weak."

Internal criticism

The Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), Vučić’s ruling party, projects unity through mass pro-government rallies and disciplined messaging. But beneath the surface, internal strain is visible.

Some SNS hardliners have called for an uncompromising crackdown on protests, while more pragmatic figures warn that excessive violence could threaten Serbia’s relationship with the EU and risk losing vital pre-accession funding.

Vučić has managed this internal tension through tactical reshuffles. After the late June clashes, Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned, and Đuro Macut – a technocrat with no independent political base – was appointed in April.

The change allowed Vučić to appear responsive without relinquishing control.

In practice, Vučić’s approach to dealing with protesters has shifted over time, from initially ignoring student demonstrations to deploying selective police crackdowns, then orchestrating mass pro-government rallies to project strength.

His tactics now include demobilising the protestors by selective arrests designed to intimidate, while portraying the uprising as a CIA-inspired colour revolution.

Serbia’s international situation

Serbia today sits in geopolitical limbo, caught between competing allegiances and constraints. Its accession to the European Union, formally begun in 2014, has slowed to a crawl, stalled over failures to meet key benchmarks on judiciary independence, corruption, and media freedom.

As EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos bluntly warned in April, “without these changes Serbia cannot advance… What we are looking for is very close to what the people… are looking for.”

Belgrade is also at loggerheads with Brussels over Russia. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Serbia has been the only country in Europe not to impose sanctions, maintaining cheap Russian natural gas imports and cultivating close political ties.

Vučić attended the May 2025 Victory Day parade in Moscow and continues to rely on Russia’s veto power at the UN Security Council to block Kosovo’s membership, a crucial issue for Serbia.

China plays a parallel role in Vučić’s balancing act. Over the past decade, Chinese state-backed investment has poured into Serbia: railways, highways, factories, face recognition surveillance systems, and major loans.

It was money from Beijing that funded the renovation of the Novi Sad station whose collapse triggered this uprising.

These loans have become geopolitical leverage for Vučić, allowing him to warn EU officials that if accession demands are too stringent, Serbia can “lean east.”

Kosovo remains the ultimate prism for Vučić's foreign policy choices. For domestic audiences, he casts every decision as a defence of national pride and territorial integrity.

For international audiences, Kosovo allows him to justify hedging, maintaining ties with Russia and China, engaging with NATO when useful, and resisting full EU alignment.

This tightrope is increasingly difficult to walk as Western officials scrutinise Belgrade’s repression of protesters. EU officials are considering whether to withhold pre-accession funding as leverage but remain wary of pushing Serbia fully into Russia’s orbit.

Protesters’ strategy and evolution

Serbia’s student-led movement has distinguished itself not only by its scale but by its form: a decentralised, horizontal organisation built around plenaries with no leaders, where every participant can speak, vote and propose action.

This structure has allowed the movement to avoid capture by political parties while staying flexible and responsive.

The protests reflect a distinctly Gen Z ethos, bringing tactical creativity to the streets, moving from solemn vigils to rapid-response flash blockades, and "outsmarting" tactics designed to frustrate police without violent escalation.

Their generational freshness has caught Serbia’s political establishment by surprise.

As Serbian writer Saša Savanović observed, "Students have opened up a horizon towards another kind of democracy, another kind of future."

The movement, she writes, is "a historic development worth paying attention to given that it comes against the backdrop of Europe-wide backsliding on democracy and a crisis of the political establishment."

Students’ dilemma

But this success also presents a dilemma. As the uprising deepens, plenary debates increasingly grapple with whether to remain purely civic or to engage directly in politics, including whether to support opposition parties.

“Citizens are no longer afraid,” warned Ivanka Popović, capturing the mood of a society that has lost patience with a decade of corruption and backsliding.

For Serbia’s Gen Z protesters, the barricades are no longer just a reaction to a tragedy but the beginning of a fight to reclaim the country’s institutions from a government they believe no longer deserves them.

A version of this article first appeared at TVP World.

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