A Student Movement Takes On a Captured State in Serbia’s Election
A Student Movement Takes On a Captured State in Serbia’s Election
Raša Nedeljkov, Dragana Žarković Obradović, and Gazela Pudar Draško explained the deeply unequal conditions under which Serbia’s October 25 election is taking place, and how a student-led movement has built an unusual challenge to the ruling party.
In Brief
- Nedeljkov, whose organization CRTA is observing the election, said the vote is “far from democratic,” with pressure on public employees, misuse of public resources, and impunity for officials creating “a completely uneven playing field.”
- Žarković Obradović said Serbia’s 2,000 media outlets offer “a simulacrum of pluralism,” with 80% of viewership controlled by fewer than 20 people, and that stories by independent outlets rarely reach audiences of traditional television, leaving citizens in “two completely parallel realities.”
- Pudar Draško described the student movement as an “advanced participatory experiment” that chose its candidates through two cycles of discussion, proposal, and evaluation, and has built infrastructure to monitor polling stations across Serbia and abroad.
Days before Serbia’s early parliamentary election, the Democracy Action Lab (DAL) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) convened a panel on the conditions under which citizens of Serbia will vote. The webinar, “A Captured Field, an Open Contest: Serbia’s Upcoming Elections,” held on October 16 and co-sponsored by Stanford’s Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES), brought together Raša Nedeljkov, Dragana Žarković Obradović, and Gazela Pudar Draško. Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy, moderated the event.
Nedeljkov serves as program director of the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA) in Belgrade and has led its election observation mission since 2016. Žarković Obradović is the director of BIRN Serbia, part of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. Pudar Draško, a political sociologist, is a senior research fellow and director at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (IFDT) at the University of Belgrade.
Serbia will hold a parliamentary election on October 25 after nearly two years of sustained protest that began after the collapse of the canopy of the railway station in Novi Sad on November 1, 2024, which killed 16 people. The main opposition challenge comes from an electoral list formed by the student movement, which has gained broad support from most opposition parties and stands against Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Approaching his two-term limit, Vučić stepped down as president in September to run for prime minister, and a presidential election is due by the end of the year.
Fukuyama opened the conversation by calling the Balkans “one of the important testing grounds for the resilience of democracy and its ability to fight back against a rising tide of authoritarian government,” and singling out Serbia as “the most important test case.” The election itself, in his view, is “more like a plebiscite… an up-or-down vote on Vučić and his leadership.”
An Uneven Playing Field
Nedeljkov said that CRTA’s findings on the conditions of the vote are clear. “These elections are far from democratic. They are not happening on an equal playing field. They are not happening in a free atmosphere,” he said.
“It’s quite clear that the election day is not the one that is the most problematic,” Nedeljkov said. Over a decade of observation, he has seen conditions worsen with each cycle: pressure on public-sector employees and private companies that do business with the state, abuse of public resources and office, media capture, and attacks on civic rights. “Each of these practices may look small on its own; however, together they are definitely creating a completely uneven playing field.”
He pointed to CRTA’s media monitoring, which found that Vučić personally accounted for every other second of prime-time political coverage on national television news, while 88% of coverage of the Student List was negative in tone. He also described the recent one-off payments to large swaths of the electorate, close to €1 billion against a 2026 budget of €25 billion, as “helicopter money,” and warned that the voter register goes into the election “completely unchecked and unverified.”
The most troubling feature of the campaign, Nedeljkov said, is impunity of public officials and supporters of the ruling party. “Those who abuse their power, they’re no longer fearing that they’re going to have any kind of consequence,” he said. “[The only ones] who can fear and should fear are those who speak up.”
Voting abroad has also become contested in this cycle, Nedeljkov said. While only about 30,000 Serbians abroad voted in previous elections, more than 100,000 have applied this time. Some polling stations abroad were not opened, with no criteria given, and for the first time voters abroad will vote on Belgrade time, which means voters on the U.S. West Coast will vote overnight.
Two Parallel Realities
Žarković Obradović said the protests have made Serbia’s media scene livelier, with many small, mostly digital outlets, while traditional media remain captured. She described “a simulacrum of pluralism with 2,000 media outlets, but then, effectively, 80% of viewership share is controlled by less than 20 people.” Independent outlets have no access to public funds, and advertising is politically controlled because “in [a] captured state, you cannot do business if you’re not good with the ruling party.” BIRN, she said, has not been granted an interview with a public official in ten years.
She cited BIRN’s recent interview with a ruling-party insider who, under his own name, described a decade of paid work for the party, much of it unlawful: “buying votes, bullying people, beating people.” According to his testimony, he planted provocateurs among protesters to instigate violence that was then blamed on them and drew police action, was paid in cash from the office of a public company’s director, and spent two weeks in the camp that ruling-party supporters have maintained between the Presidency and the National Assembly in Belgrade, where, he said, people were armed and worked with the police. “We all kind of suspected and knew that things like that are happening,” she said. “But we’re not able so far to find somebody who will talk about that under their own identity and to be able to verify all these claims.” Smaller independent outlets carried the story; public service television, she said, did not. “And that’s how two completely parallel realities are created.”
Žarković Obradović was also critical of some of the language often used to describe the political situation in Serbia. “We are talking about polarization most often,” she said, “but I see it as a very asymmetric polarization, with one side having all the resources, and then the other one being exhausted financially, but also institutionally.”
“We have media laws. It is just that they are not implemented,” Žarković Obradović said, and BIRN itself faces several strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs). She also warned of rising physical violence: by one monitoring organization’s count, top officials make at least 100 defamatory public statements about journalists every month, and colleagues who will cover election day “are preparing as if they are going to the war zone.”
A Participatory Experiment
Pudar Draško described the student movement as an “advanced participatory experiment within society.” It began as a decentralized movement in the universities, mobilized on social media, and has kept a horizontal structure for almost two years. Facing captured media, students walked from city to city, reaching people who have no access to independent television. “Those were their kids, those were their grandkids, and that really brought some kind of emotion of joy and hope to the people that the change is possible,” she said. “In Serbia, fear changed the sides.”
The movement’s candidate list was assembled over two cycles of open discussion and evaluation, bringing together activists, farmers, and experts. “They do not need leaders. They need a group; they need institutions,” she said. Local assemblies known as zborovi have organized to cover polling stations in Serbia and abroad.
Asked by Fukuyama how a leaderless movement could govern, Pudar Draško said the movement is working out how to choose candidates for president, prime minister, and ministers. With a presidential election to follow, “our period of crisis will not end only on 25th of October, even if there is a clear win there.”
She also described pressure on universities, including salary cuts during the student blockades and the government replacing IFDT’s governing board — the work, she said, of “a regime which is not respecting any rules anymore.”
Election Night and the International Dimension
Responding to audience questions, Pudar Draško said the most likely outcome on election night is that both sides declare victory, and that the student movement has clear strategies to avoid violence and provocation. “The student movement will not try to engage in any kind of violence, and I think this is something which is very important to emphasize,” she said. Žarković Obradović stressed that independent media must be able to report in real time that night. “[The] underlying question of all this is the trust,” she said. “Who can be trusted with counting the votes?”
Nedeljkov said CRTA will observe a representative sample of polling stations, following international methodology for citizen observation, so that the public knows the results, despite what he called “an enormous pressure to kill the witness.” He also warned of politically biased foreign observers, citing the precedent of Georgia, where “the role of international fake observers was to whitewash the elections and election day results.”
An audience member asked whether Western governments were enabling the status quo for geopolitical convenience. “It’s not untrue,” Žarković Obradović said. “Definitely, stabilitocracy and pragmatism are something that we are witnessing, not just in Serbia.” She added that the climate toward Serbia’s ruling party is changing.
View a full recording of the conversation:
*This article was drafted with the assistance of Claude from the event transcript. All quotes were checked against the recording, and the text was reviewed and edited by the author.