In Serbia, thousands of students have been squatting in their university buildings since November. They organize flash protests, peaceful guerrilla actions, mass protests, road blockades and marches. Their demands: the rule of law and a Serbia free of corruption.
On Feb. 1, tens of thousands of people blocked the three bridges over the Danube River into Novi Sad (they blocked the Zezelj Bridge for 24 hours) to mark three months since a deadly accident occurred at the city’s main train station. On Nov. 1, a concrete canopy of the newly renovated station collapsed, killing 15 people and seriously injuring several more. Many blame the regime for the disaster, which they believe ultimately resulted from mismanagement and corruption. Serbia has been governed by President Aleksandar Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) since 2012.
Novi Sad hasn’t seen this scale of civil disobedience since the protests of the 1990s, which precipitated the fall of ex-dictator Slobodan Milosevic in October 2000. “We are together, fighting for the rule of law,” says Stasa Cvetkovic, 22, a student of architecture at the University of Belgrade. “We are here for what happened in Novi Sad, for the victims, for the rule of law and because we don’t have a functioning legal system; there is so much corruption. We are trying to create a system that is nonexistent. Because the system, the democratic system — like parliament, government — is not working,” she adds.
“This guy is the nastiest man I’ve ever seen. He is a liar and a manipulator. Do not trust him!” This text, together with a photo of Vucic and the words “Burn Book” (a reference to the movie Mean Girls), is printed on a large banner held by a student standing next to the Zezelj bridge in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second biggest city. Around her, students play chess and card games like Uno; they wave Serbian flags. The screams of vuvuzelas and whistles are deafening.
On Feb. 15, on “Sretenje” (Statehood Day), a public holiday marking Serbia’s struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire, tens of thousands of citizens — students, teachers, farmers, medical professionals and public transit employees — gathered in the central city of Kragujevac. In a symbolic act of remembrance, the protesters blocked the city’s main boulevard for 15 hours and 15 minutes to honor the 15 victims of the Novi Sad train station disaster. On the same day, Vucic held a counter rally in the city of Sremska Mitrovica, a stronghold of the SNS. Vucic used the occasion to criticize the student-led protests, describing them as attempts at a “color revolution” orchestrated by foreign entities aiming to destabilize Serbia.
The Serbian student movement has a long history of civil disobedience. In June 1968, students at the University of Belgrade — then part of socialist Yugoslavia under President Josip Broz Tito — rose up against economic inequality, corruption and political repression. In the 1990s and 2000s, the movement, under the name “Otpor” (“Resistance”), played a key role in toppling Milosevic, who was later tried for war crimes in The Hague. Otpor’s success went on to inspire color revolutions in countries around the world, including in Ukraine and Georgia. When the opposition compared him to the ousted Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, Vucic vowed in a video on Instagram: “I will fight for Serbia and serve only my Serbian people and other citizens of Serbia, I will never serve foreigners, those who seek to defeat, humiliate and destroy Serbia.”
At a time when voters and governments from Germany to the U.S. are shifting further to the right and exhibiting growing authoritarian tendencies, Serbian students are demanding transparency and democracy. In Germany’s Feb. 23 election, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party secured a historic second place, underscoring this broader political shift. In contrast, Serbia’s student-led movement is fighting against corruption and state control — a rare example of grassroots democratic resistance in an era of rising political repression. A similar example has emerged in Georgia, where citizens have been protesting the ruling party’s decision to suspend European Union accession talks, growing authoritarianism and closer ties with Russia.
The blockade in Novi Sad was only the latest in a wave of massive student-led, anti-regime protests. Students across Serbia, who say they are independent and not supported by opposition parties, have squatted in their university buildings and organized peaceful road blockades, demonstrations, protest marches and pop-up guerrilla actions. The students have four broad demands. The first is for all documents related to the railway station disaster to be made public. The second is for those who attack students (whether they are pro-regime civilians or masked “provocateurs,” whom students say were sent by the regime) to be charged and prosecuted. The third is for all charges against students and professors to be dropped. And the fourth is for there to be a 20% increase in the state budget for universities.
At the end of January, both Prime Minister Milos Vucevic and Milan Duric, the mayor of Novi Sad, resigned in what they said was a response to the student protests. Vucevic is the third minister to resign over the disaster — after Goran Vesic, the minister of construction, transport and infrastructure, and Tomislav Momirovic, the trade minister. In response to protesters’ demands, police have made several arrests, placing Vesic under house arrest. Additionally, the government has approved the 20% budget increase for university education.
The students say, however, that not all their demands have been met. “We don’t care about who resigns, it is just something to distract us with,” says Cvetkovic. Many students see the resignations as an attempt to create a media spectacle so that the government can avoid delivering meaningful reform. The students want those responsible for Novi Sad to be properly charged and prosecuted, not sacrificed by the SNS. “We don’t care about resignations; we do care about our demands and the rule of law,” Cvetkovic adds.
Neither the prime minister’s office nor the SNS responded to New Lines’ requests for comment. Serbia’s minister of foreign affairs, Marko Djuric, offered the following statement:
President Vucic is quite popular in Serbia, despite what you might think when looking at the street protests. Now, the reason for this popularity is not chance or personal charm, but the results that he was able to deliver to the table of the average Serb. Serbia was able to double the size of its national GDP in less than a decade. He was able to, under his political leadership, build more than 500 kilometers of new highways in Serbia. I believe we must work very carefully on greater economic and social mobility, and a more intensive fight against corruption and organized crime.
A few days before the 24-hour blockade of the Zezelj bridge, students at the campus of the University of Novi Sad were slowly waking up, drinking coffee in their pajamas and scrolling on Instagram. Next to them were several banners. One showed the police chief as a puppeteer, controlling masked men, representing the provocateurs he allegedly sent to spark student violence so that the pro-regime media could claim the protests were not peaceful. Another banner was emblazoned with a snake and the slogan “Give us cobras,” referencing Vucic’s public statement that he could have sent a military police unit called the Cobras “to deal with the students.” The students’ defiant response was that they were not afraid.
“My diploma doesn’t mean anything if the country doesn’t obey its laws,” says Ivana, a first-year student of psychology at the University of Novi Sad. She asked us not to publish her surname because her family does not support her actions. She slept at the campus that night, along with many others. “We sleep and eat here; we have a stove to cook on. It’s mostly noodles, pancakes — nothing fancy,” she says. “We are fighting for the state to follow its laws; for institutions to do their jobs.”
Ivana takes us to one of the meeting rooms in the rectorate, the university building she has been living in for weeks. “This is where real democracy happens,” she says. A thin layer of mud covers the floor, from students’ regular travel to and from the protests. Paper nameplates indicate the names of the different faculties that are part of the blockade. Here, three student representatives and three observers vote on decisions in daily plenary sessions that sometimes last as long as eight hours.
“Yes, it’s a mess when everybody is stating their own opinions, but it pays off as eventually everyone is happy, because it’s either a compromise or something that everybody agrees on. Here nobody has a secret agenda,” says Ivana, describing the proceedings as very democratic, with everyone granted the right to speak without interruption. It is deliberately the opposite of what happens in the Serbian parliament in Belgrade, where opposition and SNS politicians can get into shouting matches or fights with each other.
Because politics is “divisive” and “rotten,” the student movement does not, on purpose, have a leader, says Ivana. “But it’s also because we want no leader in the movement. Our names don’t matter. Everyone is us. Nobody should stand out because it becomes more vulnerable if we have someone to represent us.” Ivana is referring to the risk that the regime tries to sabotage the peaceful and nonaligned movement. Students have to watch their every move: They don’t want to give the SNS or their supporters any ammunition to harm them. “We need to remain civilized, and we need to make clear distinctions between them and us,” Ivana adds.
Outside, a young woman in a white apron dances to “Ljerka,” the late protest singer Dorde Balasevic’s popular ode about love and nostalgia. Balasevic often criticized nationalism and war and is widely held up as a symbol of peace and unity in a region marked by conflict. In front of the dancing student stands a makeshift bar with three kettles and packets of donated instant coffee and tea. Three others join in the dancing. A boy with dyed red hair, Doc Martin-type boots, metal earrings and an oversized leather jacket checks the ID cards of students coming into the faculty building to prevent outside agitators from coming in. In front of the building, dozens of people are painting banners for the demonstration at the three bridges. Two stray dogs walk by. “Those are our riot dogs,” a student says proudly.
“It’s really cool, people from different walks of life are supporting us, especially teachers at elementary schools, high schools, some professors, farmers and young people, and people with small kids,” says Ivana. But the students also face resistance. “I have a neighbor in my building who slashed the tires on my bike a couple of times,” Ivana recalls. “The employees of this building are really pro-regime, and they were kind of blackmailing us that if we don’t let them pass, they will not let Erasmus students go on their exchanges.” The Erasmus Program is an EU-funded exchange initiative that allows students across Europe to study, train or gain work experience abroad. It is a valuable and sought-after opportunity for Serbian students, who, to escape the high unemployment at home, look for work in the EU. According to Ivana, the university administration tried to pressure the students into ending their blockade by implying that they would slow-walk applications for Erasmus internships until the deadline had passed.
In Belgrade, the university blockade continues. Banners and bedsheets are emblazoned with painted red hands — the symbol of the movement, which conveys that the government has the blood of Novi Sad’s victims on its hands. “Whilst we are doing things peacefully, they use every trick in the book to suppress us,” says Cvetkovic. “We had students arrested and held in a dormitory; they were charged for trying to violently overthrow the constitutional order.” Cvetkovic is receiving threats on social media, she says, and her parents are now quite worried.
This is not the only violence students have experienced. On Jan. 28, a group of hooded men emerged from the local SNS office in Novi Sad and beat five students from the university’s faculty of medicine as they were mounting posters on buildings to announce a mass blockade of the three bridges on Feb. 1. One 23-year-old student was hospitalized with a dislocated jaw. At previous demonstrations, angry citizens have screamed at students, calling them “provocateurs,” while in Belgrade, regime supporters deliberately drove their cars into groups of protesters, hitting several of them.
Students blame pro-regime media, which has aired negative coverage about them, for fueling public hostility. SNS propaganda is widespread and influential. Vucic understood its power early; in the late 1990s, during the wars following the breakup of Yugoslavia, he served as minister of information in Milosevic’s government. In Serbia, most media outlets are either regime- or opposition-aligned, with only a few independent media outlets. Pro-regime outlets have a far greater reach, while opposition outlets often struggle for visibility, with some not even appearing on cable TV in certain regions. Many people, particularly the elderly, watch the public broadcaster and therefore see a great deal of Vucic.
Faced with a controlled media landscape, students feel creative actions are their only option. So they have adopted tactics like disrupting live broadcasts of Radio Television of Serbia (RTS), the public broadcaster and Vucic’s mouthpiece, by walking in front of a reporter or blowing whistles during a live standup, particularly when the reporter claims that only a “small number of people” are present at any given protest. The students say their actions are designed to counter the media’s disinformation about the real scale of the demonstrations. Within RTS, there are some “quiet heroes” who insert fragments expressing criticism of the regime into news reports. Now that the protests have become too large to be ignored, media outlets are covering them. But, says Cvetkovic, none of the media outlets has invited student protesters as studio guests.
Meanwhile, the SNS holds counterrallies in towns that are regime strongholds, busing in supporters and state company employees, whose jobs are predicated on loyalty to the party.
Cvetkovic understands how hard it is to resist the SNS. In the poorer parts of Serbia, like her hometown of Vranje, people need “warm food on the table,” she says. “People who are only watching the national television, sometimes they think that [supporting the SNS] is the only way out.” To counter SNS dominance, students say they are traveling home more often to speak to the people in their hometowns about their actions.
On Jan. 30, hundreds of students walked 50 miles from Belgrade to Novi Sad to join the blockade for the three-month anniversary of the train station disaster. The atmosphere at the march was peaceful. Hundreds of young people walked with their tents and dogs; one student brought his skateboard. Citizens hung out of their windows and waved to the crowd. In the villages, elderly people watched the parade and some cried. Citizens laid out juice, water and homemade food like pork and sweets for the students. “Students will eat so much that they will arrive fat in Novi Sad,” joked a woman in Stara Pazoda, a town on the way to Novi Sad.
The student movement has now garnered support from people across the country, Cvetkovic explains. “So we have people just realizing, yeah, it’s about my child,” and that has made all the difference: “Normal people, like my parents, wouldn’t have had the courage to step out if it wasn’t for me, or these experiences from the past, proving that we are safe now [to stand up]. My parents are now speaking to their friends [about the protests].”
At the same time, the students still face widespread skepticism. Serbia has seen several rounds of mass protests in recent years — against lithium mining, “stolen elections” and in response to two mass shootings, one of which resulted in the deaths of several children and a security guard at an elementary school in Belgrade. Many believe the students will be unable to sustain the momentum. Others fear Vucic is too strong and that even if new elections are held, there will be no political change because the opposition is so disorganized. They fear that Vucic’s party will win again.
In Novi Sad, psychology student Ivana is under no illusions about the difficulty of what is ahead for the students in the coming weeks but sees no reason to stop standing up for what she wants: “We can’t really destroy all corruption in the country in three months, but we can start by prosecuting every person responsible for this accident in Novi Sad. That’s why we insist on those terms for ending the blockade. We have to start somewhere.”
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