Serbians voted on Sunday in a snap parliamentary election that pits a student-led opposition movement against Aleksandar Vucic, the populist leader who has governed the Balkan country for more than a decade as prime minister and then president.
Polling stations opened at 7 a.m. and were set to shut at 8 p.m. (1900 GMT), with initial results expected roughly two hours after voting concludes, The Straits Times reported. Vucic called the election in September after nearly two years of student-led protests sparked by the November 2024 collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad that killed 16 people, a disaster widely blamed on government corruption.
The Student List, running candidates for all 250 parliamentary seats, is headed by cardiologist Ilija Srdanovic and includes university professors, actors and farmers. An Ipsos poll published Thursday gave Vucic's Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) 47% support versus 40% for the students, though other surveys have shown the opposition ahead. Dusan Vucicevic, a political scientist at Belgrade University, told AFP he projected the Student List would top 40 percent, which would be the strongest opposition showing since SNS took power in 2012, GlobeTV reported.
Vucic resigned the presidency to seek the prime minister's post again and campaigned on higher pensions, public sector salary increases, healthcare investment and subsidies for young couples. He has repeatedly labeled the student movement a foreign-funded coup attempt backed by operatives in Croatia and Montenegro, an accusation the students reject.
Relations with the European Union have frayed over a lack of reforms on the courts, rule of law and corruption. A Council of Europe delegation this month noted "hostile and aggressive rhetoric" against opponents. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in September condemned the large public funeral in Belgrade for convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic as contradicting Serbia's EU path.
About 150,000 people joined a final student rally in Belgrade's Slavija Square on Thursday, according to the independent Archive of Public Gatherings cited by The Guardian and The Straits Times. Around two dozen Serbian civil society groups said this week that the election environment did not meet free and fair standards. On Wednesday, Belgrade prosecutors interrogated six detainees suspected of planning violence and attacks on election day.