At 19:00, the crowd stopped whistling, blowing vuvuzelas, and chanting protest slogans. The 15 minutes of silence for the 15 victims began, as it has every day since November 2024. Yet the commemoration was interrupted by a brief mass panic among thousands of demonstrators the cause of which initially remained unclear. What at first was only speculation has proven to be true: the demonstrators were targeted by an auditory crowd control device known colloquially as a “sonic cannon”. Its use quite possibly represents a criminal act against thousands of peaceful demonstrators, as Serbian law prohibits the use of such devices as crowd dispersal tools.

Almost simultaneously, turmoil swept through the crowd in front of the Parliament. The street lights went out, stones were thrown at the police, and a fire broke out. The student organizers had been aware of this possibility and had, as a precaution, made a last-minute decision to move the main protests from the plateau in front of parliament to Slavia Square. During the previous week, young and middle-aged men and women had filled a park in front of the parliament, among them representatives of local municipal administrations, posing as “students who want to study” and demanding an end to the protests. They were joined by thugs in balaclavas and retired members of the Red Berets, a disbanded special operations unit involved in paramilitary activities and political assassinations. The park (a natural monument) was surrounded by fences and used tractors donated by supporters of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, oozing fuel, ready to catch fire, and protected by the police.

After Vučić had spent days claiming that the otherwise peaceful protests would turn violent, at least part of the public assumed that the people in the park would eventually be attacked by government supporters, allowing Vučić to justify a violent crackdown on the protesters and/or declare a state of emergency. Thus, in order to prevent the violence, the students who had taken on the role of stewards gave the prearranged signals to end the protest. Protesters, and indeed the country as a whole, were left wondering: Was it right to end the gathering? And what will happen next?

A Culmination of Struggles

The protest on 15 March was perceived as a culmination of four-and-a-half months of gatherings, blockades, and occupations that took place in more than 400 localities across Serbia and, according to at least one opinion poll, attracted the support of 80% of the population.

As other authors have explained, university students demanding justice for the victims of the Novi Sad tragedy represent the backbone of the movement. However, given the mass, cross-generational and cross-class participation, the movement can also be seen as representing a combination of a students’ and popular movement.

Given that the movement, broadly speaking, lacks clearly identifiable leadership and organization, calling an end to the protest after the violence started was arguably the right thing to do. 

The current mass protests can also be seen as the culmination of at least four waves of mass protests in previous years — including the protests against lithium mining in 2021, against state violence in 2023, against electoral fraud in late 2023, and against lithium mining again in 2024. The crucial difference is that this mobilization hasn’t lost momentum, but continues to grow in terms of the number of sympathizers and people on the streets. On the other hand, as many have noted, the “pumping up” of the protests — as one popular chant puts it — cannot go on forever.

Expectations for the “15^th for the 15” protest were high, at least among some of the demonstrators. Given the many events preceding it, including three large nationwide rallies in the cities of Novi Sad, Kragujevac, and Niš, many suspected that 15 March would be the day the government capitulated. Accordingly, immediately after the students called off the protest, a segment of the public accused them of “leading the people on” and “turning their backs on them at the first sign of trouble” and thus missing an opportunity to act radically.

Yet given that the movement, broadly speaking, lacks clearly identifiable leadership and organization, calling an end to the protest after the violence started was arguably the right thing to do. Would it have been better to “take on the enemy”, so to speak? This scenario fails to take into account the invention of gunpowder, let alone more sophisticated weapons. As was revealed in the days following the protest, the police had positioned up to 14 Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs), each capable of causing significant and irreparable damage, throughout the city centre, at least one of which was ultimately deployed. Looking back, the students probably did the only thing they could.

Charting a Path

One could argue that the student movement’s attitude towards oppositional political and civil society actors contributed to its ongoing lack of a political infrastructure. From the outset, student collectives publicly distanced themselves from almost all existing organizations. By doing so, they attracted broad popular support in a society highly suspicious of politicians and opposition parties. At the same time, however, they unwillingly catered to the government’s narrative of NGOs as agents of foreign influence, hindered other actors from joining the struggle, and thus arguably reduces their own chances of forming broader political blocs.

Until fairly recently, some of the student movement’s messaging even went so far as to claim they “did not want to get involved in politics”. Now, however, it seems that students are wholeheartedly embracing direct democratic self-organisation as their own brand of “politics”. Increasingly, the student movement is calling upon all Serbian citizens to organize into local assemblies and embrace direct democracy. But will their appeals resonate in a society already jaded by decades of economic anxiety, corruption, and widespread pessimism? Here, both domestic and international developments have a crucial role to play.

There is a trope in Serbian culture that says “the whole world is against us”. The saying was often told as a joke during the protests because, at least so far, the protests have failed to make headlines in the international press — and not just because the world is preoccupied with Ukraine, Gaza, and Donald Trump. Rather, Serbia — and specifically Vučić’s Serbia — has become a vital part of the agenda for multiple world powers. The EU in particularly is keen to harness the country’s lithium reserves and has proven particularly muted about the protests. The consequent absence of EU flags in the streets is thus not only the result of decades of aggressive nationalism fed to the Serbian people by mass media, but also symbolizes the widespread recognition of Serbia’s neo-colonial position in the world economy.

The “15^th for the 15” protest, however, proved too big to be ignored, thanks in part to authorities’ use of a sonic cannon. It remains to be seen whether the EU will adopt a firmer stance over Serbia’s corruption and authoritarianism at a moment when similar protest are spreading across neighbouring Macedonia and Turkey (that tackling inequality is not on the agenda appears self-evident). Vučić’s position could become very precarious indeed should he stop being perceived as a force for stability in the region, and, above all, a safe bet for international investors.

Changing the Culture

Internally, an ongoing cultural shift has the potential to influence the course of political events. The 2023 protests emerged under the slogan “Serbia against Violence”, after two mass shootings committed in two days, one of them at an elementary school, pushed people to reject the sort of aggressive, violent rhetoric that floods Serbian mass media. This movement builds on that sentiment, but is qualitatively different. Serbia has witnessed so much solidarity and empathy in the last four-and-a-half months, proving that the protests of 2023 were not in vain.

Do people have the time and resources for this kind of organization to spread? That is a difficult question.

Bearing this in mind, a degree of optimism is warranted regarding the students’ appeals to the general public. Local communities have now started to organize local assemblies, with at least 15 scheduled for the coming days. There are claims that the “demand” for assemblies has been so huge that the students of the University of Belgrade’s Faculty of Organizational Sciences will soon publish a manual on the matter.

But do people have the time and resources for this kind of organization to spread? That is a difficult question. Striking education workers already face pay cuts. Moreover, reports of judicial pressure against the protesters are growing. The Ministry of Education is also trying to crack down on the universities, going so far as to ask the deans not to respect the autonomy of the university and to let the police force evict students participating in the blockades of faculty buildings. At the same time, it took only a few days for IT workers to set up a donation platform to supplement teachers’ salaries, demonstrating the growing solidarity across society.

Meanwhile, on 20 March, the “disowned” parliamentary opposition presented a proposal for an interim government with a nine-month mandate to create conditions for the realization of the students’ demands and fair elections. As we finish writing this text, the Students’ Council of the Faculty of Biology in Belgrade has already published its response to the opposition’s proposal:

We believe that the fulfilment of our demands does not depend on a change of government or the replacement of one representative by another, but on a fundamental change of the system. Only by decentralizing power and spreading the struggle to all social groups can we create conditions in which the government truly serves the people and not the other way around. That’s why we call for self-organization — in faculties, workplaces, and local communities. We must no longer depend on individuals in positions of power. We are building a society based on solidarity, where everyone has a voice and the right to decide their future! Everyone to the assemblies!

Iskra Krstić

András Juhász

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