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Sitting on the balustrade of a viaduct in Belgrade, Uroš Pantović wasn’t in the mood to mince his words. The 22-year-old had joined tens of thousands of others protesters on Monday to block one of the Serbian capital’s main intersections, turning the junction into a sea of mostly good-humoured but nonetheless determined dissent.
“We’re here to tell our government that it’s accountable to us,” said Pantović, a student at the law faculty of the University of Belgrade, who had come with three friends from his home town, Kosjerić. “I came here to help people because the government tries to screw us over in many ways.”
The atmosphere was peaceful: alongside those waving banners with anti-regime slogans and blowing whistles, young people played card games, basketball and chess. Free coffee was handed out. Tents had been pitched, so students could protest overnight. Cars on the highway below the viaduct honked in support of the students.
This was just the latest in a wave of student-led anti-government protests in Serbia that have taken place since November. Students have squatted in university buildings and organised road blockades, protests and peaceful guerrilla actions. The student movement runs on food donations and operates independently from their university management and opposition parties.
According to some, it is the biggest student-led movement in Europe since 1968; certainly, it is the among the biggest waves of dissent in Belgrade since the protests that led to the fall of the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević in 2000.
The trigger for the demonstrations came on 1 November, when 15 people died and several were seriously injured when the concrete canopy of the newly renovated train station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second largest city, collapsed. Many blamed the government for the disaster, alleging corruption and incompetence.
Protesters are demanding accountability from their government and that its state institutions follow the rule of law. The ruling party, The Serbian Progressive party (SNS), has been in power since 2012, and Aleksandar Vučić, its autocratic leader, has been president for the last eight years.
On Tuesday, the prime minister, Miloš Vučević, a close ally of Vučić, resigned over the Novi Sad collapse and the protests, but the students are not placated: they want a fundamental overhaul of a system they deem rotten to the core.
“Accidents like the terrible one in Novi Sad could have been prevented if only the simplest of regulations were followed, but the government showed its incompetence,” said Pantović.
“We are here to fight for our political lives and country,” said Jovan Stikić, 19, an engineering student at the University of Belgrade, who was at the blockade on Monday. “Our ruling party likes to say that this is an anti-government protest and unconstitutional, but here we fight for this country and this constitution.”
“For freedom,” said his friend, Vuk Nektarijević, also a student. Stikić added: “Freedom this government violates on a daily basis.”
This is why the students say they do things differently. One rule is to have no leader; making it harder for authorities to disrupt the protests. Second, all demonstrations must be peaceful, and any debris has to be cleaned up. Third, all decisions must be made democratically during hour-long plenary sessions in their university faculties.
“We’re changing this situation in our country for young people so that they can grow up in this country and work in this country, not having to move to Europe,” said Stikić.
In recent weeks Serbia’s students have galvanised support from citizens across the country – tens of thousands of people in cities such as Belgrade, Niš and Novi Sad, but also in provincial towns and villages, have taken to the streets to support their youth. What binds them all is frustration with what they see as dysfunctional politics.
On Monday, Tina Pribićević, an 18-year-old high school student from Belgrade, marched back and forth on the empty city intersection with a homemade banner urging: “Man, get angry.”
“We believe that the system has been corrupted for quite some time, ever since our prime minister was murdered,” she said.
In 2003, Zoran Đinđić, the then prime minister and a proponent of democratic reforms, was assassinated in Belgrade because of his pro-western reforms and crackdown on organised crime.
According to scholars, international observers and advocacy organisations, Serbia has long grappled with a weak rule of law, which is undermined by endemic corruption, political interference, fraudulent elections, and severe restrictions on independent media. “The regime functions like a mafia,” said Srđan Cvijić, a political scientist and president of the international advisory committee of the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy (BCSP), an independent thinktank. “Corruption is widespread.”
Pribićević, who is finishing high school in a few months and wants to study law, said she didn’t want to be “forced to leave” Serbia once she graduated, but wanted to stay and “be proud” of her country. But she was not proud “of this system now”, she said.
“We’re only going to stop protesting when they give us what we ask for. It has been three months and nothing changed; they’ve just been lying to us because they can’t accept the fact that their system is going down.”
In Belgrade, a 50-year-old motorbiker, Boris Pantović, had also come to support the students. “Our students want the institutions to do their proper job. These are our youth, our students, our future.”
Not everyone thinks like him. While the actions of the students are peaceful, there has been violence on the sidelines. Last Monday, a group of students from the faculty of medical science at the University of Novi Sad were placing stickers on buildings around the city when they were attacked by masked men. One student was hospitalised. During other protests, cars have driven into students.
Regime-affiliated media have broadcast negatively about the students, swaying some people against them. At a press conference yesterday, Vučić said that “order will be restored in Serbia, peace and stability will be preserved”. He added: “We must go back to work. The country must function.” He has accused foreign media, including the Guardian, of lying about the protests. The office of the Serbian prime minister and the Serbian government were approached for comment.
Meanwhile, the president has attempted to bring the protesters onside, most notably with the resignation of Vučević, who was Novi Sad’s mayor from 2012 to 2020 during the early stages of the railway station’s reconstruction project. On Wednesday, Vučić’s office said it had pardoned 13 people, including six students and several academics, who had been arrested in connection with the protests.
He has also promised to release documents on the reconstruction and hinted at a major government reshuffle. Several arrests have been made.
However, these announcements have so far not placated the protesters. They demand systemic change, and have planned a large march from Belgrade to Novi Sad this week, to mark the three-month anniversary of the disaster. Students say having the president take justice into his own hands is “useless”. They demand a functioning system, with transparent institutions working according to the rule of law.
“This protest is finally giving some people hope that things will change,” said Nektarijević. “We are done with corruption and politicians”, added Stikić, because “corruption is not only in the ruling party, it’s in every party that we had till now. So, we are not just fighting the regime, we are fighting for the system to be changed.”
