Serbia's Student List Wins the Election as Vucic Concedes, Ending 14 Years of Progressive Party Rule

Serbia's governing party lost power on Sunday night, and its leader said so himself. Aleksandar Vucic, who resigned as president in September to run for prime minister, conceded that the student-backed list had won the snap parliamentary election, ending 14 years of Serbian Progressive Party rule. "It is clear that we have lost these elections," he said, Al Jazeera reported.

The numbers are projections, not a final count. Vucic told the country that a stratified sample of ballots gave the Student List between 135 and 140 of the 250 seats and his own list about 105, according to Euronews. A government needs 126 seats, so the projected range would give the students a majority on their own.

What are the results of the Serbian election?

By Vucic's account the Student List took about 2.2 million votes and the Progressive Party about 1.72 million. He said the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians would hold three seats and an Albanian party one, with a possible seat for another minority party, and that no other list had entered parliament. Euronews noted that the official count was still to come and that it was unclear whether smaller parties had cleared the 3 percent threshold.

Turnout was the other headline. The State Election Commission put it at 64.9 percent by 6pm local time, the highest since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992, among roughly 6.5 million eligible voters and 18 competing lists, Al Jazeera said.

How did a student movement beat the ruling party?

The Student List grew out of protests that began in November 2024, after the canopy of a railway station in Novi Sad collapsed and killed 16 people. Demands widened into a movement against alleged corruption and repression, which Vucic and his party deny. It is not a conventional party, and Euronews describes its support as reaching well beyond campuses into urban and opposition-leaning voters.