The critical event that triggered this now almost ten-month-long movement was the collapse of the canopy at Novi Sad’s main railway station [1], which had just been renovated for several million euros (£millions), killing 16 people. Too obvious were the excuses and lies of those politically responsible, who in their first media reflex, in the person of the President, wanted to blame socialist Yugoslavia for the collapse. Too deadly is the network between the ruling party SNS [2], mafia-like structures and political loyalties that place little value on workplace safety and building regulations.

Bring on the Rule of Law

During the protest months, much has happened, both on the part of the protesters and on the part of the rulers. The regime’s first reflex to the steadily growing protest movement followed a familiar and tried-and-tested pattern: the protesters were denounced as a foreign-funded, anti-Serbian clique that had also betrayed Kosovo [3]. To show how little support they had among the electorate, the President showed himself ready to call new elections. These would be the seventh parliamentary elections since 2012, when the SNS first became the strongest force.

Contrary to the tradition of contemporary Serbian parliamentarism, however, the students, as the dominant group carrying the protest movement, did not behave in the traditional manner of the completely discredited, mostly liberal opposition, which regularly fell for the regime’s political manœuvres and subsequently complained to EU institutions that the elections had been unfair. Instead, they let the President fail, ignored his threats and addressed their demands to the de jure responsible government with its de facto meaningless Prime Minister Miloš Vučević.

These demands were so spectacularly unspectacular that they exposed the grotesque deformation of the Serbian state apparatus into a service company for the ruling party and the business interests close to it: publication of the documentation on the reconstruction of Novi Sad’s main station for independent technical review; release of all participants imprisoned at the beginning of the protests in November 2024; criminal prosecution of those individuals who were deployed in the form of paid thugs against professors and students from Novi Sad; and a 20 per cent increase in the budget for state universities.

None of these demands has been satisfactorily implemented so far, not even the actually quite banal demand for independent review of the building documentation. Instead, the regime tried to bring the protests and thus the political situation under control with the help of political scapegoats such as the meaningless resignation of Prime Minister Vučević, whose power stems from his function as chairman of the SNS anyway, and targeted and selective use of violence.

Symbolic Victories

However, the result of this strategy was the massification and spread of discontent. What had been a movement mainly carried by students, whose powerful feature was to become the sixteen-minute silence for the total of sixteen victims, became a popular protest supported by broad sections of society against arbitrariness, corruption and for the rule of law.

For the first time in the Vučić era, one got the impression that the otherwise so effective propaganda machine of the SNS could find no effective antidote and was overwhelmed by the situation. So whilst the regime initially stumbled, the protesters celebrated one symbolic success after another: with marches across the country, accompanied by demonstrations of sympathy, with high-profile cycling tours to the West European centres of power Brussels and Strasbourg [4], right up to solidarity demonstrations in Berlin and Vienna.

At home in Serbia, more and more people joined the protests: An estimated 100,000 people took part in the first major protest event in December 2024, followed by nationwide “anti-corruption protests” in January 2025 with a total of over 100,000 participants, and on 15 March a mass demonstration with an estimated 300,000 people lining the streets of the capital Belgrade.

And yet: despite these mobilisation successes, the political successes of the protesters remained limited. The attempt to internationalise the protest to build additional pressure on the regime failed mainly because the key political actors in the West had no interest in putting pressure on the Belgrade autocrat.

The USA is interested in real estate investments that the Belgrade regime wants to enable; the European Commission is very interested in the lithium deal [5], whose guarantor is also Aleksandar Vučić. There is little room for “values-based” foreign policy - and thus, apart from encouraging words in the European Parliament, nothing substantial for the Serbian majority population.

Dare More Patriotism

On the popularity scale, however, the movement increased to the same extent that the government lost support, which from early May also led to a far-reaching change of strategy.

Now it was the protest movement that demanded early new elections. In doing so, however, the protesters also gave up the initiative, because the decision lies with the President. Aware of his critical popularity ratings, the President has been playing for time ever since.

In addition, the organisers of the protests decided to emphasise the national-patriotic element. This was particularly publicly evident in the decision to organise another major rally on 28 June, which, in the context of Kosovo mythology, plays a central role for Serbian nationalism as Vidovdan [6].

The strategic idea of the organisers may well have been to steal the show from the self-proclaimed national-conservative regime on this historically charged day and to mark the protests as particularly patriotic. Consequently, the list of speakers was peppered with nationalist and clerical hardliners, only occasionally and with rather short contributions interrupted by liberal intellectuals such as Vladan Đokić, the Rector of Belgrade University.

The reactions to this happening, which was about territorial integrity and unity of the country as well as resistance against foreign mining giants like Rio Tinto [7], were correspondingly critical. Some commentators in Germany recognised in this a takeover of the protests by nationalist and clerical actors for whom the Vučić regime is too unpatriotic and too business-minded with the West.

The truth, however, is that the protests had a patriotic undertone from the beginning. Playful and “modern”, in places with pop-cultural similarities to the rebirth of German nationalism during the 2006 Football World Cup. The Serbian tricolour became a mass phenomenon, waved by young students who were also connectable in the predominantly Muslim university town of Novi Pazar [8].

A Global Success Story?

Nevertheless, amazement about this is misplaced, because nationalism has taken over cultural hegemony in many places, not only in Serbia. The students were basically forced from the beginning to play the national card at least alongside the demand for the rule of law, quite regardless of how direct-democratic their organisational efforts with plenums and grassroots assemblies might look. Especially since the socialist left in Serbia played no role in the ideological formation of the protests.

Moreover, within the fragmented left, there is now a verbose and Moscow-subsidised nationalist wing that, for example, tries to rehabilitate Slobodan Milošević [9] as an exemplary anti-imperialist fighter.

If we look at neighbouring Croatia, we also see there an increasing presence of nationalism in public space - from a recently held military parade with much pomp to a mass concert by the demonstrably far-right musician Thompson [10], which the social-ecological city government of Zagreb, ruling with an almost absolute majority, was unable to ban due to lack of political backbone. Meanwhile, the right has now made it a permanent political task to ban musicians from Serbia from performing, arguing that they would hurt the feelings of Croatian veterans from the civil war of the 1990s [11].

The nationalist narrative is thus nothing foreign to the protest movement; its importance has only changed due to the internal balance of power.

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The author is a historian and advisor for Western, Eastern and Southeastern Europe at the Centre for International Dialogue of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.