A tense election in Serbia will decide if a student movement can topple populist leader Vucic

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Serbia is holding an early parliamentary election this weekend with a grassroots student-led movement trying to end the 14-year rule of the Balkan country's powerful leader Aleksandar Vucic and his right-wing populist party.

The authoritarian former President Vucic wants to return as prime minister after the vote on Sunday. But his Serbian Progressive Party, or SNS, faces a serious threat from the newly-formed Students' List — a movement born out of almost two years of student protests triggered by a train station tragedy in 2024.

The election is closely watched in the European Union, which has criticized democratic backsliding under Vucic in Serbia, a candidate nation for EU membership. It also comes as student and youth protests shake France and several other EU countries.

Even though Serbia's 6.4 million voters can choose from multiple parties, the vote is shaping up to be a referendum between Vucic and his SNS party on one side, and the Students' List on the other.

Observers expect a high turnout, predicting that most smaller parties could end up below the 3% threshold needed to make it into the 250-member Parliament.

International election monitors and the EU already have expressed concern about the safety and fairness of the ballot that has been marred by pre-election detentions, near-total government control over the media and reports of surveillance and cyber attacks against activists.

The previous election, in 2023, was followed by opposition protests claiming fraud as international observers reported a number of irregularities.

This week, the Serbian Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability monitoring group cited “narrowing of freedoms and deepening of inequality” among election participants and voters. The report by the group noted over 100 violent incidents during the campaign.

Vucic has campaigned fiercely in round-the-clock live coverage on pro-government media. He has attacked his opponents as foreign mercenaries pushing a color revolution and chaos against his plans to build prosperity, new roads and hospitals.

Ditching his proclaimed pro-EU position that helped his populist party come to power in 2012, Vucic repeatedly boasted of an endorsement from Russia’s President Vladimir Putin .

Putin, he told the state RTS television this week, knows that “there won’t be any sanctions” against Russia only if the populists win.

“It is no coincidence that Vladimir Putin said he hopes that I will be the prime minister,” Vucic said.

Last month, Vucic also defied the EU by allowing a hero’s funeral in Belgrade for Ratko Mladic , the former Bosnian Serb army commander convicted of genocide by a U.N. court in the Netherlands. The SNS party next joined forces with Vucic's former hard-right Serbian Radical Party, whose leader Vojislav Seselj is also a convicted war criminal from the Yugoslav conflicts in the 1990s.

Critics accuse Vucic of choking the country with rampant corruption, ties to organized crime and a crackdown on democratic freedoms, particularly the media , which he has denied. Suspicions of graft in state railway projects triggered student-led protests after a collapsed canopy at a train station in Serbia's northern city of Novi Sad killed 16 people in November 2024.

The students' call for accountability and justice over the tragedy in Novi Sad has attracted voters who had been disillusioned with mainstream politicians.

The students' final campaign rally on Thursday evening in Belgrade gathered huge crowds of boisterous supporters chanting “Victory.”

"Not everything is going to be great after Sunday, but it will be much, much better,” said Lidija Miladinovic, a supporter of the student bloc.

The students have campaigned under “Students win” and “Serbia or mafia” slogans in a mixture of hope and urgency in their message. The leaderless youth movement has focused its struggle on restoring justice and the rule of law in the country they say is ravaged by corruption.

Vilified in the pro-government media, the students have marched and cycled through the country to reach voters in rural areas, which are traditionally Vucic’s strongholds.

Opinion polls ahead of the vote have published varied results while both camps say they are ahead. Aleksandra Krstic from Belgrade's Faculty of Political Sciences said what happens on election night is hard to predict.

“I do not see a possibility that he (Vucic) would concede defeat,” Krstic said. Vucic, she added, holds “extraordinary power, huge influence and a (political) machinery that has been perfected.”

Scores of students have been arrested and accused of anti-state activities in the past two years. Violent incidents during protests often involved Vucic’s loyalists who have been camping in a park in central Belgrade for over a year.

“Serbia’s autocratic and authoritarian regime has had nothing to do with democratic values for a long time now,” Krstic said.