Serbs from all walks of life have had enough with their corrupt, inept, and increasingly authoritarian government. Will Serbia’s president be able to withstand the crisis?
By John Chin
February 2025
Serbs are once again taking to the streets to protest the corruption and political dysfunction of President Aleksandar Vučić and his ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). More than 660 mass demonstrations have been organized nationwide since November 2024, with the largest rallies in Belgrade drawing crowds as large as 100,000.
The demonstrations began after a concrete canopy above the entrance of Novi Sad’s railway station collapsed on November 1, crushing fifteen people in the country’s second-largest city. The student-led protest movement encompasses diverse segments of society, from professors and lawyers to farmers and workers. They are fed up with the broken political system that allowed such negligence. Scenes across Serbia today mirror those of the Bulldozer Revolution that ousted the country’s dictator, Slobodan Milošević, in 2000.
The protesters have already won concessions from Vučić’s government. In December, Serbian prosecutors charged thirteen people in connection with the collapse, including the former construction minister (who had resigned in November). On January 25, Vučić urged the release of all classified documents relating to the collapse, a key student demand. Three days later, Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned. And the following weekend, much to Vučić’s chagrin, Serbian state media gave prominent coverage to the demonstrations for the first time. Yet the movement shows no signs of stopping until there is accountability and systematic reform.
“Corruption Kills”
Corruption and incompetence in government infrastructure projects led to the disaster in Novi Sad. The station had reopened only in July after undergoing repeated renovations as part of a project to modernize the Belgrade-Budapest railway under China’s Belt and Road Initiative. “Corruption kills” has been a rallying cry of the protest movement.
Serbia ranks 104 out of 180 countries in public corruption, tied for last (with Ukraine) among EU membership candidates. The Serbian state’s connections to the mafia are extensive, with critics even calling Serbia a “mafia state.”
The overarching grievance is Serbia’s autocratization under the SNS, which has rolled back much of the promise and progress of the Bulldozer Revolution. After 2000, Serbia transitioned to democracy, and was elevated to the status of liberal democracy in 2007. Between 2014 and 2018, however, the country relapsed into electoral autocracy. Serbia saw the fifth-largest drop in Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) liberal-democracy scores in the last decade. Among European countries, only Hungary and Poland experienced larger democratic declines.
Although voting rights and human rights are still generally respected, constraints on Serbia’s executive have become weaker and the electoral playing field less fair since SNS’s parliamentary ascent in 2012. The ruling party has since undermined media freedom, increasingly tried to intimidate the opposition, and grown more personalistic.
Repeated Resistance
Recent antidemocratic trends in Serbia have been met with waves of protest, beginning in 2017, when Vučić was first elected president in a contest the opposition and protesters decried as fraudulent. Uncoordinated, leaderless protests under the banner “Against Dictatorship” were organized on Facebook with a call to action: “The first battle in the war for a better future begins.” But Vučić and the media largely ignored the protests, which eventually fizzled.
The second wave began after thugs brutally assaulted opposition politician Borko Stefanović in November 2018. Blaming the attack on an “atmosphere of violence” under Vučić, protesters adopted the slogans “No more bloody shirts” and “One Out of Five Million” (#1od5miliona), the latter a reference to the president saying he would not meet opposition demands “even if there were five million people in the street.” The protest movement lasted nearly two years — one of Europe’s longest-running. Vučić neutralized it by mobilizing progovernment media and rallies, and agreeing to a European Parliament–mediated dialogue on electoral reform. The protests lost momentum in 2020, when the opposition boycotted the parliamentary elections and the pandemic offered a convenient pretext for banning mass gatherings.
May 2023 saw a third wave of protests after a pair of mass shootings, one of them at a Belgrade elementary school, claimed seventeen lives, eight of them children. Soon after, thousands marched in Belgrade and Novi Sad against a government-fanned “culture of violence” under the banner “Serbia Against Violence.” Protesters demanded the resignations of the education minister, interior minister, and head of the intelligence service, as well as bans on news outlets that promoted violence. They stopped short, however, of calling for Vučić to step down — that is, until the December 2023 parliamentary elections. International observers criticized the “unjust conditions” of that vote, and the opposition rejected the results. The Serbia Against Violence movement then organized mass protests against what they claimed was a stolen election. The government denied the accusations and put down the demonstrations with force.
The current protest wave is demanding justice for victims of the disaster at the Novi Sad station, transparency in government operations, and an end to increasingly corrupt, authoritarian rule. Students Against Authoritarian Rule, formed a year ago at the University of Novi Sad, is leading the charge: Occupying university buildings, holding weekly “Stop, Serbia” silent vigils, and staging daily traffic blockades at 11:52 a.m. — the exact time the concrete canopy fell — that have paralyzed urban centers. A general strike last week closed schools, bookstores, theaters, and law offices.
Last Saturday, students led an 80 kilometer march from Belgrade to Novi Sad, where tens of thousands blocked three bridges over the Danube River to mark the three-month anniversary of the tragedy. The protesters were warmly received in every small town they passed along the way, and were even celebrated with a feast by the people of Stara Pazova. Although many students have been hesitant to engage in conventional politics, having little faith in their current political system, many occasionally chanted “Gotov je!” (He’s finished!), an old Bulldozer Revolution slogan. After the marchers spent the night in tents, hundreds of cabbies organized to give them free rides back to Belgrade on Sunday. On Monday, the Serbian Bar Association announced a monthlong strike, which could grind the judicial system to a halt. This growing broad-based support for the student protesters suggests that the tides of popular opinion may be drifting away from Vučić.
In hopes of weathering the protests, Vučić has adopted some Russian-style talking points, demonizing the initial protests as being led by violent, nonstudent agitators and accusing “foreign agents from several Western countries” of stoking unrest. Authorities have arrested some activists but not yet unleashed the kind of heavy repression seen in Georgia. Most of the violence directed at protesters and journalists has been perpetrated by masked vigilantes and proregime supporters driving cars into protest crowds.
Toward a Democratic, European Future?
Across Eastern Europe, from Georgia to Slovakia, democrats are rising up to demand their countries take their rightful place in democratic Europe. So far, the Serbian protests have been focused on justice and accountability and have not been explicitly political. Crowds have also been free of European Union signs, reflecting more domestic rather than Europeanist concerns. Yet Serbia’s position in Europe is nevertheless at stake.
Serbia applied for EU membership in 2009 and gained EU candidate status in 2012. Last August, President Vučić admitted that EU membership is unlikely before the end of the decade, but promised in October to try to “accelerate our European path.”
But the Vučić government is hedging its geopolitical bets by cultivating closer ties with Russia and China, whose influence in Serbia has soared to second and third place behind Germany’s, per Formal Bilateral Influence Capacity (FBIC) data. Both Russia and China have voiced their support for Vučić in the current crisis.
Moscow’s influence in Belgrade is rooted in a shared Slavic-Orthodox Christian heritage and Russia’s historic role as a defender of Serbian territorial integrity, particularly in Kosovo. Moscow floods Serbia with propaganda through media outlets like the Russian state–controlled RT and Serbian far-right, pro-Russian groups such as People’s Patrol. Recent public-opinion surveys show that 51 percent of Serbs consider Russia their most important international partner.
China’s rising influence in Serbia is more strategic. When Serbia joined the Belt and Road Initiative in 2015, it became the fourth-largest European recipient of Chinese foreign direct investment. By 2022, Chinese investment in Serbia surpassed that of all EU-27 countries combined. In May 2024, Vučić and Xi Jinping upgraded their comprehensive strategic partnership: Serbia became the first European country to join the “Global Community of Shared Future,” China’s alternative to the United States–led liberal international order.
So far, the protests in Serbia have gained little international support. The United States and European Union have remained conspicuously silent. Although Vučić is trying to become a friend of the new Trump administration and claims that Serbia is still on the road to EU membership, his balancing act between the West and East may become increasingly untenable. Serbia’s Russia-friendly foreign policy and democratic backsliding pose obstacles to EU accession. Many of the protesters recognize this, with some Serbian civil society groups urging the European Union to become “an ally” in the current crisis.
Whether Vučić prevails, changes course, or is forced from office remains to be seen. If the government puts down the current movement against corruption and authoritarian rule, it may signal the end of Serbia’s path to democratic Europe as the regime retrenches and reorients eastward. But if the movement succeeds, it could reverse the recent backsliding and strengthen Serbia’s European future.
John Chin is an assistant teaching professor of political science in the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the lead author of the Historical Dictionary of Modern Coups D’état (2022). He thanks Daniel Hayase, a CMIST graduate student, for excellent research assistance.
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: ANDREJ ISAKOVIC/AFP via Getty Images
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