On 1 November 2024, a concrete canopy collapsed at the renovated railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second city, killing fifteen people and severely injuring two more. Three weeks later, as students and academics at Belgrade’s Faculty of Dramatic Arts held a silent vigil for the victims, they were attacked by a group of masked men. Last week I spoke with Vanja Šević, a 22-year-old graduate student at the university. ‘The response has been way bigger than we thought,’ she told me. ‘It is a fight for justice. The message is that we can’t tolerate this any more.’
Protests broke out across Serbia after the Novi Sad disaster. Adopting a red handprint for a symbol and ‘corruption kills’ as their slogan, demonstrators blamed the collapse on rampant graft in the construction industry (Serbia’s railway infrastructure is being upgraded with funds from China). Tens of thousands took to the streets to confront the government of President Aleksandar Vučić, whose Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) has been in power since 2012.
The protests continued, and so did the violent response. The men who attacked the art students on 22 November are widely believed to be senior members of the SNS. In January, a gathering outside the SNS headquarters in Novi Sad was attacked by men with baseball bats. Cars have been driven into crowds of protesters.
The students’ resolve has only hardened. By December, three-quarters of the country’s universities had joined the protests. At the end of the year, 100,000 people took to Slavija Square in Belgrade in the largest demonstration in Serbia for at least two decades. In January, students initiated a 24-hour blockade of the capital. Farmers on tractors joined them, in a vivid echo of the revolt that brought down Slobodan Milošević’s regime in 1999. When students marched from Belgrade to Novi Sad in early February, they were met by thousands of well-wishers, who gave them sleeping bags and home-cooked meals. Taxi drivers offered their services pro bono for the return leg of the journey. Opinion polls indicate that more than 60 per cent of Serbs support the students. It has been described as the biggest European student-led movement since 1968.
The elections in 2023, in the words of the European parliament, were marred by ‘the incumbents’ persistent and systematic abuse of institutions and media to gain an unfair advantage’. Demonstrators staged a blockade of state TV last week. The students’ demands are clear: chief among them, the release of documents relating to the Novi Sad station reconstruction, the freeing of detained protesters and more transparent governance. ‘It is not just a student revolution any more,’ Šević told me. ‘So many people have found hope.’
Vučić’s ineffectual prime minister, Miloš Vučevic, resigned at the end of January, which did nothing to soothe the unrest. Vučić tried to blame the protests on Western intelligence agencies, and claimed the Novi Sad disaster had nothing to do with the recent renovations, despite the overwhelming evidence. Vučić seems to have no intention of standing down himself. For all his limitations, he is a savvy operator. Once a hardline nationalist (‘For every Serb killed, we will kill a hundred Muslims,’ he said after the Srebrenica massacre in 1995), he has proved an adept political chameleon. If Russia and China – which have both invested billions in mining projects across the country – are obvious allies, the Serbian leader also retains the good will of power brokers in Washington and the EU, who view him as a steady hand in a troubled region.
Last September, a Serbian reporter in her forties spoke to me of a pervading hopelessness among her generation, who had come to political maturity during the fall of Milošević. With its hollowed out institutions and divided, unpopular opposition parties, Serbia’s immediate future seemed grim. Vučić’s position appeared close to unassailable, the reporter told me. Six months later, her perspective has been transformed. It’s incredible, she said last week, to see what has been unleashed.
There was more than a note of caution to go with her optimism. No one knows how any of this will play out. The student movement, full of energy and clarity of purpose, is not concerned with the ballot box. On Saturday, more than 300,000 people gathered in the centre of Belgrade, a new record. Pundits feared violent state reprisals, but the day passed peacefully for the most part, with only a few isolated skirmishes and provocations, including the alleged use of a military grade sonic weapon against protesters.
‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ Vanja Šević wrote when I checked in with her the next morning. ‘There were so many people.’ The situation remained highly delicate. ‘We are optimistic. We know we are fighting for a just cause.’
