From the tens of thousands of people who stood silently in December 2024 holding up lit mobile phones, through to the mass protest on 15 March 2025, when a mysterious sound broke the silence and caused panic among the crowd, and finally to the clashes between police and demonstrators on 28 June 2025 – the student protest returned once again to the same location and ended in a similar fashion.

As thousands of people were slowly dispersing from the Belgrade square, a group of masked youths near the building of the Serbian Presidency threw pyrotechnic devices at the police, who responded with tear gas.

Strong police forces pushed demonstrators out of the central city streets, which were patrolled by armoured and combat vehicles. Everyone who attacked police officers after the gathering at Slavija would be identified and prosecuted in accordance with the law, the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade announced. Twenty-three people were detained for attacks on police officers, and several officers were injured, Interior Minister Ivica Dačić said.

There were 34,300 people at the officially registered gathering at Slavija, and by 7 p.m. there had been no incidents apart from one attack on a journalist, stated Dragan Vasiljević, Director of Police.

The organisation Archive of Public Gatherings (Arhiv Javnih Skupova) said that footage suggested this rally at Slavija was “among the largest student gatherings so far”. The following day, they published an estimate that between 180,000 and 190,000 people had attended, based on the size of the area and crowd density.

Although the protest, under the slogan “You and Me, Slavija, Because the Students Are Winning”, was scheduled for 6 p.m. on 23 May, people had begun gathering around Belgrade much earlier and started arriving at the square well in advance. Speakers took turns on stage discussing the judiciary, history, and corruption, all of which form part of the students’ programme.

“Slavija has great symbolic significance for us, because some of our extremely important gatherings have been held there, usually representing the beginning of a new phase in the struggle,” Anja Despotović, a student at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Belgrade, told BBC Serbia.

Over the year and a half that the student uprising in Serbia has lasted – beginning after 16 people died in the collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad – it has gone through various phases. Faculty blockades were replaced by multi-day walks, marches to other cities, signature-collecting campaigns, and open demands for snap parliamentary elections and the formation of a student electoral list.

“The protest at Slavija represents the consolidation of the campaign for the student electoral list ahead of the upcoming elections,” said Amar Ličina, a student at the State University in Novi Pazar, adding “At the moment, we have a sort of promise that elections will be held, but also a strange kind of uncertainty about when they will actually be called and take place.”

President Aleksandar Vučić has repeatedly announced elections for this year, but they have not yet been formally called. They could be held between September and November, he told RTS. Following the violence on the streets of Belgrade, he once again called for dialogue with the demonstrators on Instagram, referring to them as “blockaders” with a “violent nature”. The Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), of which Vučić is formally a member, announced a gathering in central Belgrade from 26 to 29 June.

What happened in Belgrade?

As on previous occasions, railway traffic across the entire country was suspended on the day of the protest, initially without any special explanation, though it was later stated that anonymous bomb threats were the reason.

“We are at the protest because we believe the student movement can bring us a better future,” Jovana Tankosić from Vršac told BBC Serbia. Participants carried “No Surrender” flags featuring a map of Kosovo, as well as slogans against the European Union and NATO. People spent hours preparing and walked to Slavija from various parts of the city – from Zemun to Autokomanda.

At a booth labelled Ask a Student, materials were distributed outlining student proposals for education, workers’ rights, healthcare, and election monitoring, though without many concrete solutions. Behind the booth was high school graduate Nemanja Milašinović from the group called Students in Every Village, who said they had visited a large number of households across Serbia and intended to continue the campaign. “We are already working extensively on the programme of the Student List, which will be published so that we can present everything we have been demanding on the streets for the past year and a half. “Our primary goal is not to come to power ourselves, but through struggle to change something systematically in this country,” Milašinović told BBC Serbia.

At the same time, another group of people gathered around and inside Pioneer Park, where supporters of the ruling party have been staying for months. Since both the Serbian Presidency building and the National Assembly are nearby, police forces were also concentrated in the area.

‘Enthusiasm has declined’

Although one of the main slogans is “students are winning”, there are also those who view the protests differently after months of political struggle. “I believe everyone has become somewhat tired and that the enthusiasm from the beginning has diminished,” Aleksa Durković, a student at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, told BBC Serbia.

Andrija Pećić, a student at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Applied Studies in Belgrade, thinks similarly, although he still attends the protests. For him, the turning point was 15 March, when, as he described it, “it felt as though half the country had gathered”. “At that point there was a feeling that something would genuinely change, but afterwards everything somehow faded and people lost hope,” he said, adding “Today, many people no longer see the protests as serious political pressure, but rather as a routine or social gathering. People are still taking to the streets, but I get the impression they no longer even know themselves what they expect or what specifically should change – though I still remain optimistic,” he concluded.

New forms of struggle have also become visible in recent months on walls across the country, through graffiti, insulting messages, and stickers from both student supporters and the ruling party.

To the slogan “students are winning”, the SNS responded with “Serbia is winning”.

In the most recent local elections in ten municipalities across Serbia at the end of March, the SNS-led coalition won victory, though electoral lists backed by students emerged as a growing opposition force.

(BBC Serbia, 23.05.2026)

https://www.bbc.com/serbian/articles/c3021gv5r03o/lat

Photo credits: Reuters (Zorana Jevtic, Uros Arsic, Djordje Kojadinovic), FoNet (Ognjen Stevanovic)