Sitting in the trashy garden of a café frequented by students near an iconic Belgrade market, we are, naturally, discussing the elections. A somewhat hippieish father of a friend complains that the situation is terrible, that he’s never seen such polarization, and that decades-old colleagues are barely on speaking terms. He tells me he tried to lighten the atmosphere, joking “Guys, I am neutral, you can relax, you can all be yourselves with me.” His remark didn’t sit well with either camp. Nobody in Serbia these days seems to like “neutrals,” though it seems that this despised group could decide the outcome of the October 25 parliamentary elections.

There is an electric mood in the country. There have already been irregularities and sporadic individual acts of violence against opponents by members of the ruling party, with more widely expected before the vote. Previous police violence against protesters and the alleged use of a sonic weapon during a March 2025 demonstration are still vivid in the collective memory. The latter has even become the subject of Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s fifteen-channel video installation currently exhibited in Venice. Few expect election day to pass peacefully.

Aleksandar Vučić — competing to become prime minister, to which end he recently stepped down as president — is mainly communicating to his nominally “progressive” party’s (the Serbian Progressive Party, or SNS) own base, trying to harden its core vote and prevent defections. Student protesters, who registered as a group of citizens under the name “Student List–Students Win,” are campaigning under the slogan “Serbia or Mafia,” pointing out corruption, para-police gangs, and connections between the state and organized crime. They’re trying to capture all the neutral and still-undecided voters, those lacking information or interpretations of what’s going on, as well as past abstainers. There’s a fight for every vote, including those in the diaspora who will now have to be stubborn to get their votes counted: due to the authorities’ controversial decision, some will have to vote in the middle of the night or even fly thousands of miles to cast a ballot, if they can afford it.

These elections come in the twenty-fourth month of “pumping it up,” as the students’ popular slogan calls it. The vote takes place a few days ahead of the second anniversary of the collapse of the Novi Sad railway station canopy that killed sixteen people and triggered a massive wave of student blockades and protests as well as local mobilizations through people’s assemblies, known as zborovi. In between, we have seen historic blockades and protests, assemblies and organizing, mass politicization and emancipation. Many lives were put on hold, many suffered government repression, including arrests and job losses, and many invested their labors not only in elections but in building structures meant to survive them. But now the elections are served on the table, and, as the occasion demands, we need to look at the challenger, the incumbent, and the ever-so-precarious election forecasts.

The Student List, consisting of 250 candidates, was finally revealed to the public in mid-September, after the elections were formally called. The criteria for the list were set by student assemblies (plenums, in Serbian) from faculties across the country; no students were to be on the list, to show their dedication not to power but to the common good; no opposition party officials, to show a break with oppositional politics as usual that yielded no results; no prior members of the ruling coalition; and proven support for the student movement and its program.

There are a few household names, from a famous basketball player to an actor to a farmer who fiercely resisted the Rio Tinto lithium project. But in general, the final list features “ordinary people,” meaning that most Serbians will not recognize these names or what politics they represent. All candidates went through an unprecedented multistage process in which faculties could propose candidates and challenge one another’s nominations. Many candidates were vetoed for different (sometimes rather bizarre) reasons, among them the playwright Maja Pelević, who stays committed to the movement. “The veto process was a litmus test, ensuring that this was genuinely a shared, democratic decision of all the faculties,” she says, emphasizing that the plenums, not individual influence or name recognition, had the final say.

This list is meant to represent the population in general, though its success in that regard is mixed. The gender split is 55.6 percent men and 44.4 percent women. Geographically, 75 percent of candidates come from four cities that are university centers. Most striking is the occupational structure — more than 50 percent of the candidates are from the education sector, from high school to university professors. For comparison, education accounts for less than 10 percent of Serbia’s total registered employment. Part of the reason is the support that educators gave students, meaning they also suffered government repression most. Candidates do not belong to the same ideological or political factions, and some take pride in being politically nonaligned. The impression is that this was by design.

It is unknown who would take ministerial or cabinet roles in case of victory, how such a diverse group of candidates could find political and programmatic harmony in parliament, or who would prevent those elected from acting contrary to the students’ program. It is worth pausing now, for both me writing this text and for you reading it; if all of this sounds wild and experimental, that is because it is. Though there are historical reference points, like the construction of Poland’s Solidarność electoral list, the experimental and unprecedented character of the Student Lists, vetoed and voted for by anonymous assemblies representing the mass movement, is being used by opponents to discourage people from voting. We hear fearmongering that “salaries and pensions could be put in question” and that “the country could fall into chaos.”

The electoral program, developed in an equally long and thorough process of collective deliberation between plenums, labor collectives, and sectoral associations, is not fully revealed yet. The rather brief version presented as Student Plan focuses on cleaning up the state — primarily the judiciary — and the media; general claims of reforming education and health care; and providing accessible housing for youth (no luck for tenants of my age group, it seems); though fighting import monopolies and permanent employment after twelve months of temporary contract are also part of the plan. The vagueness of the program’s eleven points seems to bother no one, confirming that both students and protesting citizens are primarily focused on replacing the current government, and that the competing economic or cultural frames are postponed for after the elections.

The incumbent’s offer, meanwhile, rests on the stabilitocracy of macroeconomic indicators, foreign direct investment (FDI), and economic maneuvering between foreign powers, which also includes close cooperation with Israel. In domestic policy, Vučić has, throughout the years, repeatedly positioned himself as a protector of lower-income strata. Actually, this is how he got in power in 2012 in the first place, following the waves of rampant privatization and job losses, as part of transitional “shock therapy” implemented in Serbia a decade later than in the rest of the East. But not only was Vučić no clean newcomer, but in practice the privatization and deregulation of the labor market continued, while the public sector was clientelistically tied to the ruling party and its needs. The incumbent is still playing these cards, trying to depict students and their supporters as out-of-touch with economic realities and as instruments of the West, while he himself is a patriotic protector of the nation, an economic tiger (as the SNS slogan has it) and almost an anti-imperialist smooth operator, successfully fighting external and internal dragons.

While the Student List candidates are mainly talking about abstract freedom and the less abstract questions (if not first on everyone’s mind) of corruption and institutional order, some on the Student List are determined to center labor. Živojin Milovanović, candidate number 31, and a machine technician at the Electric Power of Serbia, says: “[in] agency employment, commonly known as ‘daughter companies’ in Serbia . . . workers are modern-day slaves, and I will keep repeating that. They do the hardest possible jobs, yet are paid far less than their colleagues, work on temporary and short-term contracts, and have no real voice.” As an early member of the Social Front, an alliance of students, workers, and farmers that emerged within the student movement, he promises changes to the labor code and the laws on strike action that would guarantee people’s right to organize in trade unions and ensure that they face no consequences for going on strike. “The regime shaped the laws to serve its own interests. It took control of the trade unions, turning them into its obedient servants. They did not fight for workers; instead, they suppressed every form of workers’ struggle, leaving workers without protection and without any means to change anything. The Students’ List wants to change all of this.”

For proposals like these, the Party of the Radical Left (PRL) has offered the Student List “critical support,” arguing that despite the limitations of its still-incomplete program, it includes candidates and positions worth supporting. It is likewise maintaining pressure for a broader anti-capitalist agenda.

Much has been debated about creating a referendum-like atmosphere, with Vučić versus the students as the key contenders. Credible and independent polling is scarce. In the latest election forecast from mid-September by Faktor Plus, the Vučić-led coalition list was at 48.6 percent, while the Student List, in continuous growth according to their previous polling, stood at 37.1 percent. Earlier polling by other organizations (CRTA and NSPM) showed the Student List ahead, by 44.9 to 44.4 percent. Across pollsters, about a quarter of voters are yet to make up their minds. There is a consistent expectation of high turnout, likely above the 58.8 percent recorded in 2023.

While Vučić and his SNS are employing arena rallies, TV ads and appearances, and an army of bots on social media, the students are relying on messaging groups and social media, plastering the city with stickers, and, more importantly, making their presence felt in person: cycling across Serbia, organizing public rallies and events, and covering multiple city locations in a single day.

Pelević, who is a member of a local, Belgrade-based popular assembly, helps students with campaigning in her municipality. “Door-to-door is essentially another form of decentralized organizing. We’re not politicians. We’re neighbors (komšije in Serbian), we’re students, and we go out and talk to people about the problems that affect both them and us. So the way we have these conversations is completely different from when some politician comes knocking on your door, has no idea what your problems are, and pretends they’re going to solve them.”

High expected turnout and a sizable bloc of undecideds are main factors cited as decisive in regard to the election result; but it may also be that the SNS camp will face defection. Economic slowdown, inflation and the limits of FDI as a core strategy for growth, visible in the depletion of workers’ rights and dignity as well as degradation of the environment, could break the spell of Vučić’s “protection.”

The students and their candidates have exposed the regime’s corruption and the havoc in Serbia’s institutions. What still needs doing is to tie these questions to an economic agenda: first, by showing that Vučić’s political authoritarianism and economic neoliberalism work hand in hand; second, by making clear that getting rid of one without the other will not be enough.

After the elections, the economic contradictions of a landlocked country whose place in the global economy rests heavily on cheap labor and lithium reserves will remain. The mass democratic opening created by the movement could also slip into parliamentary politics as usual.

What happens next will depend on the movement’s ability to rebuild and sustain its power beyond the ballot box, through people like Milovanović and Pelević and the practices they represent. And ultimately, the election may be one step on a historical path that depends not only on local conditions but also on future international alliances.