BELGRADE — Serbia’s long-serving leader Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat on Sunday in a snap parliamentary election, acknowledging that the student-led opposition list that grew out of nearly two years of street protests had beaten his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) and would form the next majority in parliament.
“The Students’ List has won,” Vučić told supporters at his party’s election-night headquarters, according to Reuters. Based on his party’s own sample of the count, he projected that the Students’ List would take between 135 and 140 seats in the 250-member National Assembly, while the SNS would hold around 105 seats, with no other list entering parliament. A majority requires 126 seats. The figures are party projections from a sample of the vote, not a final certified result from Serbia’s Republic Electoral Commission.
An independent Ipsos/CeSID projection reported during election night put the Students’ List on about 52 percent of the vote and 138 seats, against about 39.3 percent and 104 seats for Vučić’s list. Turnout was reported at about 70 percent, the highest since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992, and lines formed outside polling stations in cities across the country of about 6.4 million voters.
When the concession came after polls closed at 8 p.m., crowds poured into Belgrade’s main boulevards, halting trams and traffic, waving flags and flares and chanting “victory” and “he’s done,” according to Reuters reporters in the capital. At the Students’ List headquarters, candidates — many of them lawyers, professors, actors and farmers chosen through citizens’ assemblies rather than party machines — hugged and cheered. “The people have won! The people defeated a dictator! The people will lead Serbia!” one supporter, Nebojša Ćosić, said while waving a flag in the street, according to Reuters. A law student, Milica, told the agency: “That is the best thing that happened in my life. We will now breathe freely.”
Vučić, who has led Serbia as prime minister or president since 2014, urged his supporters to stay calm. “I do not want unrest, I do not want killings, I do not want anything like that on the streets,” he said, according to reporting of his election-night address. He blamed the defeat on Serbia’s independent media and alleged interference by unnamed European countries and an “American deep state,” and he had been endorsed during the campaign by Russian President Vladimir Putin. He had denounced the student movement throughout as a foreign-led attempt to unseat him — a charge the movement rejected.
The result caps a protest movement that began after a railway station canopy collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad in November 2024, killing 16 people. Students accused the government of corruption and negligence and of dismantling democratic institutions, and their demonstrations spread nationwide, becoming the greatest challenge to Vučić since he first became prime minister in 2014. Vučić called the snap election in September, a gamble intended to renew his mandate that instead ended his party’s long hold on power.
What happens next turns on the official count and on whether a disparate list of 250 largely unknown candidates can convert a protest mandate into a government. The Students’ List campaigned on accountability, action against corruption, the rule of law and the independence of institutions from political influence. Formal results from the electoral commission, coalition arithmetic in the new assembly, and the formation of a government will follow in the coming days. Read the Republic Electoral Commission’s official results at rik.parlament.gov.rs.
