• The protests in Serbia erupted after the collapse of a railway canopy that killed 15 people.
• Students accuse the government and President Vučić of corruption and of curtailing rights and freedoms.
• Despite some of the protesters' demands having been met, the protests continue.

On Sunday 9 February, traffic in Serbia was gridlocked. Thousands of students in Belgrade occupied the Gazela bridge, one of the capital's main arteries, for seven hours. Further north, other demonstrators blocked the streets of Novi Sad for three hours, and the same happened in the southern hub of Niš, where a motorway toll booth was blocked.

9 February marked 100 days since the start of the protests that have been reshaping Serbia since November. The tragedy of the collapse of a canopy at Novi Sad's railway station, which occurred on 1 November last year and claimed the lives of 15 people, became the spark for an enormous mobilisation against corruption and authoritarianism in the country. Leading the peaceful protests are students, organised horizontally and without any leadership, but as the weeks have passed more and more citizens have joined them. President Aleksandar Vučić has on the one hand condemned the mobilisations, and on the other made certain concessions, also leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Miloš Vučević. But the protests are not stopping.

The origins of the protests in Serbia

On 1 November 2024, at the railway station of Novi Sad, Serbia's second largest city, a canopy collapsed. The toll was 15 dead and numerous injured. The railway station had recently undergone renovation work as part of a high-speed project aimed at linking the Serbian capital Belgrade with the Hungarian capital Budapest. Carrying out the work, as is often the case in the country, were Chinese state-owned companies such as China Railway International and China Communications Construction, in this instance working alongside other European firms.

From the outset, the Serbian authorities denied that the canopy had been subject to renovation work — a position designed to free the contractor companies from responsibility for the tragedy. Then, however, came the statements of one of the engineers who had supervised the work at the station, Zoran Đajić. He contradicted the government's claims, in particular those of Public Works Minister Goran Vesić (who resigned a few days after the accident), and revealed that the canopy too had been subject to intervention.

These revelations caused widespread outrage across the country and gave rise to the first sit-ins in the city of Novi Sad, organised by university students. The protest then spread to the rest of the country, particularly to the capital Belgrade. On 22 November, students and professors from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts took part in the national vigil "Stop, Serbia" in memory of the victims of 1 November. During the vigil they fell victim to a punitive attack by hooded individuals, some of whom subsequently turned out to be members of the ruling party of President Vučić, the Serbian Progressive Party. This further raised tensions, and the students' response in the weeks that followed was the occupation of numerous faculties at the University of Belgrade and other institutions across the country, as well as the organisation of vigils and demonstrations at key points of Serbia's road network, as happened on 9 February to mark 100 days since the start of the mobilisation.

What the protesters are demanding

The collapse of the canopy at Novi Sad's railway station and the government's lack of transparency in managing the tragedy brought certain burning issues back to the fore in Serbia: political corruption and authoritarianism.

From the very first vigils, protesters — often with hands painted red to symbolise the blood of the station's victims — demanded that the government conduct a transparent investigation into the Novi Sad disaster and publish the documents relating to the station's renovation, so as to establish who was responsible for the canopy's collapse. Other demands included investigations into the assaults on students, the release of several dozen demonstrators arrested during the early protests, and an increase in the budget for public universities. As the weeks passed, these specific demands evolved into a widespread protest against the government — conservative and authoritarian — and against President of the Republic Aleksandar Vučić, who served as information minister in the late 1990s under the regime of Slobodan Milošević, before returning to government in ministerial roles in 2012, becoming prime minister in 2014 and president in 2017.

Vučić has dominated Serbian politics for over a decade and is accused of having steered the country towards authoritarianism. The judiciary is closely aligned with the government, dissidents and opposition figures face significant obstacles, and the management of contracts for major public works has come under scrutiny on numerous occasions. The non-governmental organisation Freedom House has downgraded the state of Serbian democracy to "partly free", and abuses of power, clientelist dynamics, electoral fraud and a lack of pluralism have led it to describe the country as a "hybrid regime".

In recent years there have been several protests in the country, such as in 2020 over the handling of Covid-19 and in 2021 against lithium extraction, but the president has consistently managed to emerge unscathed, exploiting these mobilisations to further attack the opposition and invoking conspiracies — never substantiated — of alleged interference by foreign countries.

No hierarchy

The thousands of students who have been protesting for over three months in Serbia have chosen to have no leadership and to organise and make decisions horizontally, through the mechanisms of direct democracy and without any political affiliation.

This opportunity for participation and for expressing one's views — without the evolution of the protests being shaped by a handful of leaders — has drawn many people to the mobilisation. From students it spread to professors, then to farmers, and then to numerous other professionals and ordinary citizens, and the result is something that in terms of turnout and public support has never been seen before in Serbia and, according to some analysts, not even in Europe — at least not recently. On 22 December, at one of the main demonstrations in the capital Belgrade, there were 100,000 people. Today approximately 61 per cent of the Serbian population supports the protests, and behind these figures lies a single driving force: the hope that the country can reinvent itself in a transparent and democratic direction.

Although the mobilisations today involve broad sections of the population, the organisation remains in the hands of students. In occupied university faculties, more or less every day, assemblies are held open to all students, during which participants are updated on how the protests are evolving and vote by majority on the next steps to take. Representatives from the various occupied faculties then meet in further assemblies, so as to coordinate the protests and seek harmony between the various decisions approved at the level of individual universities. The mechanism of horizontal organisation, useful for involving as many people as possible in decision-making processes, is also a consequence of the attacks that activists and dissidents who take a stand against those in power routinely face in Serbia. With no leadership in place and decisions taken at the level of individual assemblies, it is impossible for the country's authorities to identify those responsible for the mobilisations.

Concessions and new demands

Initially, President Aleksandar Vučić dealt with the student protests in Serbia in the same way he had handled the anti-government mobilisations of previous years: with contempt.

On one hand, he attacked the opposition, accusing them of wanting to destabilise the country and of being the driving force behind the demonstrations, despite the students having always asserted their peaceful and apolitical nature, with no party affiliations whatsoever. On the other hand, he accused alleged Western foreign powers of orchestrating the protests — an accusation refuted by the fact that, unlike other recent protests such as those in Georgia, flags of the European Union have almost never been seen in Belgrade and other Serbian cities. Indeed, the attitude of the protesters is particularly critical towards Brussels, which in recent months has never lent its support to the mobilisations, preferring instead to call for stability in the country and thus for the status quo.

When the protests then transformed into a large-scale mobilisation, Vučić began to make the first concessions. Some of the documents relating to the renovation of the Novi Sad railway station were declassified, and the president promised to increase the state budget allocated to education. Demonstrations and sit-ins continued, targeting in particular Prime Minister Miloš Vučević, who had been mayor of Novi Sad at the time of the station's renovation. At the end of January, Vučić announced a cabinet reshuffle, and the following day the prime minister resigned, bringing about the fall of the government. This did not quell the demands of the students and the rest of the population — a mobilisation that had by now gone far beyond its initial requests and had turned into a challenge against the entire political class that has held the reins of the country for years, first and foremost President Vučić.

As noted by Giorgio Fruscione, analyst at the Institute for International Political Studies (Ispi), "President Vučić finds himself at a crossroads: suppress a protest that has so far been peaceful, at the risk of becoming even more unpopular, or yield entirely to the demands of the streets, raising the spectre of an irreversible change of regime. One should not rule out, however, the possibility that the president offers yet another round of elections, presenting them as a referendum on his leadership, even if a new vote would hardly satisfy the streets' desire for justice and the rule of law." The very well-attended rallies on 9 February marking 100 days since the start of the protests sent a further message that the mobilisation has no intention of stopping despite the latest presidential concessions. The protesters' goal is a radical transformation of Serbia's political landscape, and for 15 February a new, major national demonstration has been called.