The strategic emergence of a coordinated resistance network

The coalition’s September 2025 declaration, published by the progressive portal Mašina, reveals a movement moving beyond protest coordination towards building alternative political infrastructure. “Our differences must not be an obstacle to changes without which this society will find neither justice nor peace”, the declaration states, signalling SOS’s commitment to unifying diverse local forces around shared strategic objectives to replace the Vučić regime and expand democratic participation.

A horizontal network spanning Serbia’s regions

SOS functions as an umbrella coordinating approximately 30 independent local civic movements from cities and towns across all Serbian regions. [1]

Each organisation maintains autonomy in its local community whilst coordinating on national strategic goals through partnership with ProGlas [2], the civic initiative that catalysed SOS’s formation. Member organisations share common characteristics: focus on municipal government accountability, anti-corruption activism, democratic governance, electoral integrity, and community organising. BRAVO emphasises environmental protection, gender equality, and fiscal transparency; Lokalni front focuses on direct citizen participation and environmental monitoring; organisations like GrađanIn and Uzinat have secured representation in local assemblies, providing institutional footholds.

The structure deliberately avoids hierarchical party politics. This decentralised network model represents a conscious evolution beyond traditional opposition formations that SOS views as compromised by participation in fundamentally rigged systems.

Three strategic commitments: from protest to power

SOS’s founding declaration articulates a three-part strategy for political transformation, whilst maintaining grassroots democratic principles. Like Serbia’s massive student movement, SOS opposes cooption of democratic protests vying the fractious and opportunistic political opposition parties.

Supporting the student movement’s electoral infrastructure

“We place at the disposal of the student movement all our capacities at the local level in future election activities at the republican level (in election commissions, in training monitors, as well as in the pre-election period)”, the declaration states. This commitment envisages SOS member organisations into electoral infrastructure—training election observers, staffing electoral commissions, and providing logistical support for potential snap parliamentary elections that students added as a formal demand in May 2025.

This strategic alliance recognises a weakness in the student movement: lack of local organisational infrastructure, trained election observers, and coordination capacity across Serbia’s regions. The student movement’s characteristics—decentralised coordination, leaderless structure, transparent plenums, creative tactics—align closely with SOS’s grassroots democratic principles, creating a mutually reinforcing partnership.

Continuous local pressure for SNS removal

“We are determined in our intention to exert continuous pressure in our local communities aimed at replacing local SNS government and calling for extraordinary local elections”, SOS declares. This represents the coalition’s core strategic innovation: recognising that challenging Vučić’s centralised control requires dismantling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) power at the municipal level. Vučić’s authority rests not merely on national institutions but on networks of municipal patronage, controlled local media, and SNS-dominated city and town councils.

Several SOS member organisations already have representatives in local assemblies from Vrbas to Kraljevo. By committing to “continuous pressure” rather than episodic mobilisation, SOS tries to maintain momentum sufficient to force institutional change, after one year of massive but so far unsuccessful protests and an increasingly violent state response.

Coordinating ’rebellious society’ across differences

“We call on all local movements and organisations, formal and informal, to join us in these activities in order to achieve coordinated action of the rebellious society with the aim of systemic changes in Serbia”, the declaration concludes. The phrase “rebellious society” (pobunjeno društvo) signals SOS’s self-understanding: not as vanguard but as coordinators of broad-based protest encompassing education workers’ unions (which declared general strikes in January 2025), actors and filmmakers, farmers, the Bar Association, healthcare workers, war veterans, and even nearly 500 police officers who signed petitions supporting students.

The emphasis on unity across differences—“our differences must not be an obstacle to changes” allows SOS to serve as a neutral coordinating platform for diverse local groups whilst supporting the student leadership of the popular movement.

No political vision beyond ’real’ democracy

SOS positions itself as explicitly anti-regime, anti-SNS, and anti-Vučić, rejecting traditional party politics in favour of participatory democracy and civic activism. The coalition’s political orientation centres on grassroots democratic participation, anti-corruption measures, rule of law, transparency in governance, and protection of democratic institutions.

SOS maintains a non-partisan identity, refusing formal alignment with opposition political parties whilst coordinating with what they term “non-regime actors”. This strategic positioning allows them to avoid the fate of previous opposition formations in Serbia that either became co-opted or proved unable to challenge SNS’s control of state resources and media.

The coalition’s stance towards the Vučić government is unequivocally oppositional. SOS describes Serbia’s situation as a “dramatic social and political crisis in the country, with growing repression as the only response of the regime to the demands of rebellious society”. Their declaration explicitly calls for “replacing local SNS government” and achieving “systemic changes in Serbia”—language that frames the challenge as requiring transformation of the entire political system rather than mere leadership change.

As in the student movement, while there is consensus about the importance of direct democracy, consultation and participation, SOS activists don’t have a common vision for overcoming the social and economic challenges that have led to a falling birthrate and outward migration.

Member organisations advocate for environmental protection, gender equality, fiscal transparency, and human rights, positioning themselves within a pro-democracy orientation without adopting specific left or liberal demands.

Repression and resilience

SOS member organisations and their leaders have faced systematic repression as the government responds to sustained protests. In January 2025, Serbia’s Administration for Prevention of Money Laundering requested bank account data of ProGlas coordinator Katarina Đukić and Lokalni front’s Predrag Voštinić, demonstrating use of financial surveillance against civic actors. Voštinić had previously been hit by a car in September 2023, part of a pattern of vehicular attacks against protesters, including BRAVO activist Marija Srdić who was run over in Novi Sad.

Pro-government media, particularly the locally popular Russian state outlet RT Balkan, have conducted smear campaigns targeting SOS organisations, accusing them of foreign funding and characterising the movement as an attempted “colour revolution”. This disinformation complements government tactics including false compliance with demands, cosmetic arrests, political dismissals of over 100 university and secondary school professors, media monopolisation creating information blackouts, and deployment of organised thugs to attack protesters.

Despite this pressure, SOS maintains its coordinating role and continues expanding. By December 2024, the coalition held strategic meetings with ProGlas to develop programmes for “the day after”—planning governance frameworks for post-Vučić Serbia.

From protest to political infrastructure

Unlike the 2000 movement to overthrow President Slobodan Milošević, that coalesced around opposition parties and transferred power to them through elections, the 2024-2025 uprising maintains deliberately leaderless character whilst building institutional capacity through networks like SOS.

The coalition’s declaration insists that “necessary political changes must be the priority of all responsible forces in society as the only natural outcome of the enormous social changes that we witness and in which we have participated in recent months”. This framing positions systemic change not as imposed from above but as emerging from sustained grassroots mobilisation.

By positioning themselves as electoral infrastructure in waiting—training observers, coordinating local non-regime actors, preparing governance programmes—SOS addresses the strategic challenge facing leaderless movements: how to translate street mobilisation into institutional power without replicating the hierarchical party structures they oppose.

Whether this strategy can overcome Vučić’s retention of security forces, state resources, and media control remains uncertain. But SOS has established itself as essential infrastructure for whatever political transformation may emerge from Serbia’s ongoing crisis. The coalition’s survival and growth under sustained government pressure demonstrates both the depth of public discontent and the durability of grassroots democratic organisation.

As protests continue into their second year with over 400 cities and towns mobilised and approximately two-thirds of the Serbian population supporting the movement, SOS’s emphasis on local elections, electoral integrity, and coordinated action across municipal assemblies provides practical pathways towards the regime change demanded by hundreds of thousands of protesters.

Mark Johnson