The Student List won the early parliamentary elections held on Sunday, October 25, in Serbia. Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat and estimated that the Student List would win between 135 and 140 of the 250 seats, compared to 105 for his bloc. These are preliminary figures, which would give the Student List an absolute majority. Vučić had resigned as president to run for prime minister.

Voter turnout was around 70 percent, and the streets of Belgrade were filled with people celebrating the result. The victory now raises questions about the formation of the government and who will head the executive branch.

The ruling party’s setback has democratic significance that should not be downplayed: those who stood up to intimidation and sustained the protests managed to break its electoral dominance. But this victory presents new challenges. The organizational structure built during the uprising will be necessary to demand accountability for repression and corruption, defend the people’s demands, and prevent decisions about the country’s future from resting exclusively in the hands of its parliamentary representatives.

The mobilization that led to this election began in the wake of a tragedy: on November 1, 2024, the collapse of a canopy at the Novi Sad train station killed 16 people. Outrage over allegations of corruption, negligence, and a cover-up turned demands for justice into a nationwide protest movement. University occupations, student assemblies, and mass demonstrations ultimately called the entire regime into question.

The government’s response has combined efforts to discredit opponents with intimidation. Election-monitoring organizations have denounced the imbalance in media coverage, the partisan use of public resources, and incidents of violence and threats against activists. Vučić, for his part, portrays his opponents as pawns of foreign powers.

However, the mobilization has not been limited to universities. Students, teachers, farmers, and other social sectors have joined the protests. This breadth is one of its main strengths: corruption and authoritarianism are not isolated problems but expressions of a system in which political power, economic interests, and control over institutions reinforce one another.

Although Serbia has experienced growth in recent years and maintains relatively low official unemployment rates, broad sectors of the population face insufficient wages, job insecurity, youth emigration, and a growing dependence on foreign investment. The benefits of growth have been concentrated among certain business groups and sectors linked to the government, while for a large part of the population improvements in living conditions remain limited. The corruption denounced by the student movement thus appears not as an isolated phenomenon but as one of the concrete ways in which social needs are subordinated to dominant economic and political interests.

A Rebellion that Surpassed the Traditional Opposition

The Student List brings together 250 candidates selected through university assemblies. Among them are teachers, doctors, engineers, artists, and other figures outside traditional political circles. The movement has sought to maintain a decentralized organization and avoid concentrating leadership in a single person.

Its eleven-point platform prioritizes the fight against corruption, accountability, institutional reform, judicial independence, and freedom of the press. It also proposes measures in areas such as education, health care, and the cost of living. However, its platform does not amount to a defined plan for transforming economic and social relations.

The movement’s breadth has allowed it to bring together sectors that would otherwise be unlikely to agree on all their political positions. It has also sidelined a fragmented and discredited traditional opposition, which has been unable to sustain a mass-based alternative during years of dominance by the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS).

Following the victory, the decisive question is what social interests will guide the next government and what capacity the mobilized sectors will retain to influence its decisions. The fight against corruption and the defense of democratic freedoms are fundamental. However, they do not, on their own, determine how to address job insecurity, wages, public services, privatizations, or the power of big business.

A renewal of public officials and institutions does not necessarily amount to a transformation of the living conditions of the working majority. Nor does the arrival in government of people without a partisan background guarantee that their decisions will serve the interests of those who live by their labor.

Has the Movement Entered the Electoral Arena?

Recent history offers some cautionary tales. In various countries, large-scale popular mobilizations gave rise to political-electoral movements that presented themselves as a direct expression of “citizens” or “the movements,” promising to supplant the old parties. In Spain, Podemos emerged in the wake of the Indignados movement; in Greece, Syriza channeled the massive social backlash against the austerity policies imposed by the Troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund). Both of these neo-reformist expressions of the “movement-party” achieved significant electoral success but, once in power, ended up administering the very social order they had promised to transform. They neither broke with the European Union (EU) nor challenged the foundations of capitalism in their respective countries, and repeated the very austerity plans they had claimed to want to eliminate.

This experience shows that a mass movement and a political party are not the same thing. The broad social base that makes it possible to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people against a government can be a strength in the struggle, but it also implies the coexistence of distinct and even conflicting class interests. Therefore, the decisive issue is not only who holds public office, but what program they defend and which social class leads the political process.

In the Serbian case, the heterogeneity of the Student List has been one of the keys to its growth. However, precisely for this reason, the question of what would happen if it came to power remains open. Its platform challenges Vučić’s corruption and authoritarianism, but leaves fundamental issues unresolved, such as the ownership of the major means of production, the role of big business, privatizations, and the subordination of the national economy to the demands of the global market. Without a clear answer to these problems, there is a risk that the transformative energy of the mobilization will be reduced to a renewal of political elites rather than a profound transformation of the living conditions of the majority.

The Need for Worker-Student Unity

The student mobilization has shown that it is possible to challenge a power structure that seemed firmly entrenched. But its strength should not be measured solely by its ability to win votes or change the government. Equally important is its ability to organize those who sustain the country’s economic life and suffer the consequences of political decisions.

Worker-student unity does not mean that workers passively support student demands, nor does it mean that the student movement must subordinate itself to existing union leaderships. It means linking the students’ democratic demands with the economic and social demands of the working class, preserving organizational autonomy and decision-making capacity through self-organized bodies, and using the labor movement’s historical methods of struggle, such as strikes and work stoppages.

The immediate demands are concrete: an independent investigation and punishment for those responsible for the Novi Sad tragedy; an end to repression and political intimidation; freedom of organization and protest; defense of public education and health care; living wages; job security and protections against layoffs; and democratic control over public works and resources that are currently prone to corruption.

But this unity does not mean blurring the differences between distinct social sectors. Students were the initial driving force behind the rebellion, but only the independent intervention of the working class can give the movement the social strength necessary to defeat not only a specific government but also the economic interests that sustain the existing order. That is why the question of working-class hegemony is not a narrowly sectoral issue but a strategic necessity if democratic demands are to be linked to a deeper transformation of society.

That unity also requires political independence. Workers cannot limit themselves to becoming a social base so that new administrators can occupy existing institutions. They need their own organizations, democratic deliberation, and a program that confronts corporate interests when they clash with the needs of the people.

This does not mean denying the differences among the mobilized sectors or demanding that they first achieve ideological homogeneity. It means building agreements based on concrete struggles, openly discussing differences, and preventing opposition to Vučić from turning into political subordination to any electoral alternative.

Neither Vučić nor Subordination to Brussels

One issue that warrants clarification is Serbia’s relationship with the European Union. The country has been a candidate for membership since 2012, and membership negotiations continue, albeit with difficulties. However, international press coverage does not describe joining the EU as the Student List’s central goal in these elections.

On the contrary, the movement has avoided defining a common position on EU membership and other foreign policy issues to keep a heterogeneous electorate united. Some of its members favor European integration, while the list has defended continuing the policy of not imposing sanctions on Russia. Therefore, it would be incorrect to equate the movement with the platform of the liberal parties that openly promote EU membership.

This lack of clarity does not eliminate the need to discuss the issue. The European Union is not an emancipatory alternative for the working class. Its institutions represent capitalist states and economies led by criminal imperialist powers (such as France and Germany); the integration process does not, in and of itself, guarantee living wages, labor rights, quality public services, or democratic control of the economy. The demands for competitiveness, fiscal discipline, and adaptation to the European market can become tools to justify cuts, privatizations, and austerity policies.

Therefore, rejecting Vučić’s authoritarianism must not translate into political trust in Brussels. Nor does the defense of democratic freedoms require aligning with the interests of the EU, Russia, or any other power. The Serbian working class needs an independent international policy, one based on its own interests and on solidarity with workers in the Balkans and throughout Europe.

This discussion takes on even greater importance in the context of the war in Ukraine. The Vučić government has attempted to maintain a balanced position between the West and Russia: Serbia condemned the Russian invasion at the United Nations but has refused to join the sanctions imposed by the EU against Moscow. This policy reflects both the historical relationship between Belgrade and Moscow and the interests of a Serbian bourgeoisie that seeks to gain advantages from its ties to various power blocs (it is worth recalling that Russia was considered the “protector of the Slavs” and therefore came to Serbia’s defense in World War I). However, the working class has nothing to gain by aligning itself with either Western imperialism or the Russian oligarchy.

The issue is not choosing between two capitalist blocs or accepting that the country’s future must be decided under the tutelage of one power or another. The question is which social sectors will benefit from the changes and who will bear the costs. Defending an independent policy means rejecting both Putin’s reactionary aggression in Ukraine and the imperialist geopolitical interests of NATO and the EU.

Beyond the Ballot Box

Elections may usher in a new era, but they will not, on their own, resolve the crisis that made them possible. The Student List will have to contend with institutions, bureaucracies, and power structures built up over the years.

The Serbian experience offers a lesson that transcends its borders: young people can become a driving force for mass mobilization and challenge governments that seemed invulnerable. But the energy of the streets must not be confined to electoral competition or exhausted in the replacement of officials.

The fight against corruption must advance toward democratic control of public resources; the defense of universities must be linked to the defense of public services; and the demand for political freedoms must be accompanied by collective organization in the workplace. That is the ground on which an alternative capable of responding to both authoritarianism and social inequality can be built.

Worker-student unity is not guaranteed by the scale of the demonstrations or by the youthful character of the protest. It is a political task that requires organization, deliberation, and a program of its own. Class independence does not mean isolating oneself from those who are currently fighting against the government, but intervening in that struggle without renouncing the interests of the working majorities.

From the Left Voice international news network and the Current for Permanent Revolution—Fourth International, we view unity between workers and students and mobilization in the streets as elements that help build grassroots struggle committees to create self-organized bodies. It is from this perspective that we have been actively participating on the front lines of demonstrations in France through the youth group Le Poing Levé; in the encampments for housing rights in Spain through the youth group Contracorriente; in the student occupations in Italy with our comrades from the Revolutionary Internationalist Fraction; and in Germany, against compulsory military service, through the group Waffen der Kritik.

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