Student protests in Serbia: Evolution, prospects and lessons
On June 16, 2025, the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University hosted a panel debate about the ongoing mass student-led protests in Serbia. The protests have shaken the increasingly illiberal regime in Serbia to its core and have grown into the largest student protests in Europe since 1968.
The event brought together the interested Leiden students and staff and four distinguished Leiden scholars with in-depth knowledge of the political situation in Serbia and the broader region. The debate was moderated by Dr. Karolina Pomorska and it was co-sponsored by two research clusters at the Institute of Political Science: the European Integration cluster at the cluster on Representation and Political Parties.
Setting the context: Serbia’s political landscape
Dr. Stefan Ćetković opened the panel by introducing the political context in Serbia as well as the evolution, achievements and current state of the student-led protests. He pointed out that Serbia, under the rule of the Serbian Progress Party and President Vucic, has witnessed one of the most rapid cases of democratic backsliding in Europe. Stefan also highlighted the complexity of the political situation in Serbia. It is becoming increasingly tense as students are calling for parliamentary snap elections, but president Vucic rejects such demands and uses ever more sophisticated methods of oppression.
Democratic backsliding and state capture
Prof. Antoaneta Dimitrova focused on aspects of the problem of backsliding and explained that the situation in Serbia is a part of the larger trend of democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe that takes place through state capture by rent-seeking elites, consisting of ruling parties and big businesses. Through patronage networks, capture extends to all levels of governance and weakens it. This means that state capture is a systemic obstacle to the functioning of democratic institutions, which in turn, makes reforms much more difficult. Although students in Serbia have articulated this problem through their demand that Serbian institutions need to comply with the rule of law, it remains unclear how such large-scale systemic reforms can be put in motion.
Direct democracy as a form of resistance
Perhaps state institutions can be reformed by first reforming society itself? According to Dr. Jelena Belić, student protests in Serbia contribute to democratizing of society in multiple ways. Under the conditions in which the integrity of electoral mechanisms for political participation and the expression of popular will are both seriously compromised, the student protest movement has created an alternative channel of democratic participation by exercising different forms of direct democracy. For instance, students decide on their actions by deliberating in plenums taking place at occupied universities. They have also invited citizens to exercise similar deliberative forms of decision-making in their local communities and prepared and broadly distributed a manual on how to do so. Can such direct democratic actions combined with expressing political dissent at streets also democratize the state and suppress state capture or even lead to freeing the institutions from it?
Universities under threat: privatization as a tool of oppression
Dr. Vera Šćepanović drew attention to the importance of universities as public spaces for critical thinking and warned that the privatization of universities has become one of the instruments of autocratic or autocratizing leaders to suppress any opposition. Illiberal leaders around the world have used private ownership of universities to outlaw student protests; they have used the threat of withdrawing public funding to threaten both students and staff. In Serbia, similar steps are being taken with the draft law on Higher education. Parallels can be made with the situation in Hungary, where Viktor Orban made the same move a few years ago to disable the resistance by public universities by cutting public funding and commercializing higher education. Vera also noted that commercialization of public assets has become the focal point for mobilization against state capture in South-East Europe, often in relation to big energy or mining projects, but that these movements rarely receive widespread support by the EU institutions.
Future challenges for the student movement
All these complexities and challenges to student resistance notwithstanding, the panelists agreed that the student movement has already significantly contributed to activism in Serbian society by bringing many citizens back to the political arena and mobilizing them to revive democracy in Serbia. The panelists also shared the notion that the student movement in Serbia will face a challenge of balancing between remaining a political watchdog and turning into a political party actor given that the students are about to announce the list of candidates for the next general/parliamentary elections.