Belgrade – Students marching from across Serbia poured into the capital Belgrade on Wednesday evening ahead of their final rally before snap parliamentary elections this weekend.
The Balkan nation goes to the polls on Sunday, with a student-backed election list posing the biggest challenge to the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) of former president Aleksandar Vucic.
The vote was called after nearly two years of student-led demonstrations sparked by the collapse of a canopy at the Novi Sad railway station which killed 16 people.
The November 2024 tragedy, widely blamed on corruption, sparked some of the country’s largest protests since the fall of strongman Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
The snap vote was a key demand of the student-led movement. Vucic called the ballot in September, later resigning as president to run for prime minister.
Serbia 🇷🇸: the students have reached Belgrade. Thousands are now marching from several directions to a single point in the city https://t.co/3lV9FHsVSR
— Thomas van Linge (@ThomasVLinge) October 21, 2026
As more than 1,000 students marching from several cities and towns headed to Belgrade, crowds cheered them along the way, drivers honked horns and people chanted “Victory, victory!”.
Residents of towns and villages along the route welcomed the marchers with food, hugs and, in some places, fireworks.
Students were also joined by people on tractors and bikers.
‘Fresh start’
Late Wednesday, several thousand people welcomed the first marchers in central Belgrade, many of them wearing T-shirts with the slogan “Students are winning” and badges with the number three, the student-backed election list’s ballot number.
They crowded around a red carpet laid out along the street, while flares were set off, fireworks lit the sky and trumpeters played on an improvised stage.
“It was great. We never had more support! Students are winning!” Ognjen Nestorovic, who marched from Valjevo, some 100 kilometres (60 miles) southwest of Belgrade, told AFP.
Darko Jovicic, 65, who welcomed the marchers, said the elections will “bring this regime to its knees and enable (Serbia) a fresh start as a normal, civilised country”.
Vucic, who has dominated Serbian politics for more than a decade as prime minister or president, is heading the SNS election list.
Since the start of the protest movement, the 56-year-old and his allies have accused the students of seeking to stage a “foreign-funded revolution”.
The students will hold their last demonstration on Thursday evening in central Belgrade.
Meanwhile, Vucic’s SNS held their own final major rally in the southern city of Nis on Wednesday.
“We will defeat them all on Sunday,” he pledged to the crowd while announcing smaller rallies in Belgrade and other cities on Thursday.
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Source: AFP
