How Serbian students toppled a dictator

This article How Serbian students toppled a dictator was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On Oct. 25, Serbia voted and the Student List won. Late that evening, President Aleksandar Vučić — the man who has dominated the country’s politics since 2012, steadily hollowing out its courts, media and elections along the way — went on television and admitted that his Serbian Progressive Party and its allies had lost. The final count isn’t in yet, but the result is not in doubt. Candidates selected by the Students List protest movement have more than half the vote and a majority in the 250-seat parliament.

For more than 20 years, our team at the Belgrade-based Center for Applied NonViolent Actions and Strategies, or CANVAS, has worked with activists from dozens of countries on one question: How do ordinary people defeat a government that looks unbeatable? This time the answer came from our own streets, again. We want to explain what happened, because movements elsewhere will try to learn from it, and we’d like them to learn the right lessons.

You can’t understand Sunday without understanding the 14 years before it, since Vučić first came to power.

Most people in Serbia learned to live with a low, constant fear. You assumed your phone wasn’t really yours. Amnesty International later confirmed what many suspected: Spyware was being installed on the phones of activists and journalists, sometimes while they sat in a police station. If you spoke up, a tabloid might put your face on the front page the next morning with a story about who was supposedly bankrolling you. People lost jobs and contracts for being on the wrong side. Plenty stopped saying what they thought, even at the kitchen table.

We see this pattern in almost every country we work in. That kind of power doesn’t have to arrest everyone. It only needs everyone to believe they could be next.

How it started

On Nov. 1, 2024, the concrete canopy at the Novi Sad railway station fell and killed 16 people. The station had just been renovated. Everyone understood immediately what that meant: The money meant to keep people safe had gone into someone’s pocket. Within days, “Corruption kills” was written on walls across the country.

Students shut down their colleges and refused to go back to class. Many observers abroad missed how important this was. A march lasts an afternoon. The blockade of the universities lasted for months and took a whole part of society out of normal life. In our field we call that noncooperation, and it is far more powerful than protest alone. Every regime depends on people showing up and doing what is expected of them. The students stopped.

For two years the students were arrested, followed, slandered and called foreign agents. Cars drove into crowds. People were beaten. The government gave them every excuse to respond with violence, and they didn’t.

At the largest protest in Serbia’s history, in Belgrade on March 15, 2025 — with between 275,000 and 325,000 people, according to the independent Archive of Public Gatherings — student marshals in yellow vests kept the crowd calm and blue flares showed people the way out if things went wrong. None of that was improvised. The students organized themselves. The assembly of each fakultet (a specialized college within a university) chose its marshals. Before every big action they went over the same things again and again: how to spot provocateurs, how to calm a tense moment, how to move a crowd out safely. At CANVAS, we teach this in every training we run: Nonviolent discipline doesn’t happen by itself. It is planned, practiced and repeated until it’s second nature. The students did exactly that.

Here is why it mattered so much. Violence was the one thing the regime wanted from them. A single burning car would have given the government its “terrorists” and sent the cautious middle class back indoors. 

Because the students stayed nonviolent, everyone could join. Grandmothers did. Farmers did. People who had never been to a protest in their lives did.

What it cost

People sometimes talk about nonviolent action as if it were the soft option. Anyone who watched these students over the past two years knows better.

They walked across Serbia. They arrived with bloody socks and taped-up blisters, slept wherever someone offered a floor, and set off again in the morning. In village after village people stood by the road with bread, hot tea and blankets, and a lot of them were crying. Those marches reached places that no rally in Belgrade ever could, places the government thought it owned.

Wherever they stopped, they talked with people. In town squares, school yards and village halls, they explained why they were marching and listened to what local people were angry about. They also urged residents to set up their own citizens’ assemblies, and in many towns people did, often for the first time in their lives.

Their professors paid a price, too. When fakultets sided with their students, the government cut university salaries to a small fraction of what they had been. Some professors received nothing at all for months. The president went on television and said that instead of salaries, they would get potatoes. Schoolteachers who backed the protests were punished the same way. These are people with children, mortgages and parents to look after, and they stayed with their students anyway.

A list with no politicians on it

Then the students did something we had not seen done quite like this anywhere.

They didn’t hand their momentum over to the opposition parties, and they didn’t run for office themselves. They wrote their own rules for the slate of candidates that they would support. No students could be on the list. Nobody from the ruling coalition. No officials from the opposition parties. No extremists.

For more than a year, over 80 student assemblies in six university cities proposed names, argued about them, interviewed people and vetoed the ones they didn’t trust. It was slow, messy and deeply democratic. We think that is exactly why it worked. Nobody could say it was cooked up in a back room.

What came out was a list of 250 people, one name for every seat in parliament, who were respected long before politics: professors, teachers, doctors, actors, artists and athletes. 

Serbia doesn’t have local districts. The whole country votes as one constituency for party lists, seats are shared out by each list’s share of the vote, and they are filled in the order the names appear. So the order matters, and the first name on the list was a cardiologist from Novi Sad. A former governor of the National Bank shared the list with one of the best basketball players this country has ever produced. Several opposition parties pulled their own lists and backed the students instead, which could not have been easy for them.

The people on that list don’t agree about much. Some are on the left, some on the right, and some have never thought of themselves as political at all. State-owned media called that chaos.

We see it the other way around. Movements win by bringing huge numbers of people on board, and huge numbers of people never share one ideology. If the list had looked like one camp, it would have attracted one camp. Because it looked like Serbia, almost anyone could find someone on it they trusted.

What held it together was simple. Nobody wants another leader the whole country has to obey and adore. Nobody wants to live again in a place where a handful of people get rich off everyone else. The students put it on their posters in three words: “Serbia or Mafia.”

Healing from a cancer

The best way we can describe where Serbia is today is this: we’ve had the diagnosis, and treatment has just started.

For years the country lived with a cancer — with captured courts, captured media, public money flowing into private pockets, and fear as the normal background of life. It spread slowly into nearly every institution.

Sunday’s defeat of Vučić didn’t cure it. Sunday made treatment possible.

Anyone who has sat next to someone they love during chemotherapy knows what comes next. It takes a long time. It hurts. Some weeks the treatment feels worse than the illness. There will be setbacks and bad results, and people saying things were better before. The old networks won’t leave quietly, and some reforms will fail the first time they are tried.

But this cancer can be beaten. And the whole body has to heal, including the neighbors, relatives and colleagues who voted for the other side on Sunday. They aren’t the disease. They’re part of the country that has to get well.

What we ask of each of us

No government can do this healing by itself. Here is what we think it will take, and from whom.

1. The new governing majority: Start with institutions, not with settling scores. Establish courts that are actually independent, a public broadcaster that tells the truth, and clean elections — all of which will outlast any government. And open a full, public investigation into the surveillance of citizens, so no one is tempted to do it again.

2. The movement: Don’t let the assemblies fade away. They built this list, and they are the best protection Serbia has against the next strongman, including one who might come from inside the movement itself.

3. Friends abroad: Support Serbian institutions and citizens rather than personalities. In practice, that means long-term funding for independent media, watchdog groups and local citizens’ assemblies; sending judges, auditors and prosecutors from your own countries who can work alongside Serbian colleagues rebuilding theirs; and support tied to concrete rule-of-law results rather than to warm words for whoever is in office. And please stay for the whole treatment, not only the first week.

4. Activists in other countries: Don’t copy the slogan. Copy the method. Go beyond marching to real noncooperation, train for discipline instead of hoping for it, and build unity out of your differences.

Serbia has just shown that nonviolent action still works when it’s planned, patient and carried by many hands. Now it has to show that a country can heal. We intend to be part of that work: training the next generation of organizers, writing down honestly what worked and what didn’t, and holding the new government to the same standard the students held the old one.

A version of this article first appeared on CANVAS’ newsletter.

This article How Serbian students toppled a dictator was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

People-powered news and analysis

Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/10/how-serbian-students-toppled-a-dictator/