Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat to a student-led movement in the parliamentary election on October 25, Reuters and the Associated Press reported. His acknowledgment marked a major setback for the Serbian Progressive Party after 14 years in power, although the final election results were still pending.
According to Reuters, Vučić said a sample of results indicated that the Student List would secure between 135 and 140 seats and his side about 105. The assembly has 250 members. Those figures were his preliminary assessment, not a certified allocation; the projected student-backed total would exceed the 126 seats needed for a majority.
The snap election followed almost two years of student-led demonstrations. Reuters traced the protests to the collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad in 2024, which killed 16 people. The movement challenged perceived corruption and growing authoritarianism, gathering support beyond university campuses and becoming a formidable electoral opponent.
The Serbian government’s September 9 announcement confirms that Vučić dissolved the parliament elected in December 2023 and called the October 25 vote. Election officials said 6,451,292 registered voters could choose among 18 lists at 8,392 polling stations. The contest therefore concerned the composition of parliament and the balance of power for forming a government.
AP described high turnout and tensions during voting, with riot police surrounding the election commission headquarters in central Belgrade. A student representative appealed for calm before polls closed. The concession gives the movement a prospective parliamentary breakthrough, but the seat estimates should remain distinct from the commission’s completed count.
In a Sunday evening government update, election commission chief Vladimir Dimitrijević said most polling stations closed at 8 p.m. Voting continued where interruptions exceeded an hour or voters were still waiting outside. He said results would appear progressively online as polling-station returns arrived and passed statistical and consistency checks, rather than only after every station had been processed.
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