>>2910711Well it's a long story if you don't know the current political situation in Serbia. If you do, it's a surprise that there are going to be snap elections in the first place since Vucic/SNS popularity is down by a lot and it looks like they're going to lose. Due to how presidential elections work in Serbia (two round system), SNS would have lost them if they were the first or together, so SNS decided to just disband the parliament and have Vucic remain president, then transfer over to prime minister if they win the parliamentary elections (proportional system, with 3% threshold). They also went for the minimum allowed period between announcement and election day (45 days) so the election will be on 25 October.
On the opposition, there has controversy over whether the opposition parties should take part in the elections or just endorse the Student list. I'm probably forgetting some, but like 5 have endorsed it, 3 made one lib coalition, another 3 made another lib coalition and some others went into a conservative coalition. It's very likely that at least one of these three coalitions are going to fall below the threshold, maybe even all 3.
I'll try to give a QRD on the current political situation, but I find it hard to explain. There's been a protest movement since November 2024 that has been calling for elections since May 2025. It started as a response to the Novi Sad canopy collapse, which killed 16 people. It was initially started by opposition parties like several other protest movements during the Vucic era (all of them whimpered out after like a month or two). They blamed SNS and their corruption for the collapse and that has generally been the central theme of the protest movement. In my opinion this is true, but western leftists on the Internet seem to call it bullshit when corruption is protested. But I've heard that the term political corruption has a broader meaning in Serbian than in English, though I don't quite understand that.
Anyway, the protest movement was, after a few weeks, taken over by university students organized into meetings called plenums where any student of the faculty (universities in Serbia are divided into faculties, which are like departments but much more independent) could come to participate. The plenums formed and blockaded the faculties in Serbia one by one, until almost all the public university faculties were blockaded after a month or so.
The inciting incident for the first blockade was some SNS members (at least one of them was a council member from SNS for a municipality) attacked some students and professors of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts while they were doing a 14 minute traffic blockade (14 was the number of deaths of the canopy collapse at that point) in front of their faculty building. The other faculties' students joined to support them, but also generally because of the canopy collapse and dissatisfaction with Vucic/SNS.
Their demands were an investigation on whose fault the canopy collapse is, releasing documents regarding the renovation/reconstruction project on the train station (some were classified as state secrets), prosecuting those SNS members who attacked that blockade and increasing the education spending. SNS didn't want to do any of those. The students organized protests in various places and so on but SNS' only response was to release some unimportant documents, arrest some ministers (and later let them free) and promise to increase the education spending.
The plenums formed some organizational structures in order to coordinate between faculties and universities, and to make decisions outside of plenum meetings. At this point they were organizing a large protest per month, culminating in a huge protest on 15 March 2025, which was the biggest public gathering in Serbia since the Bulldozer revolution, or even bigger than that. There, during the protest, it appears some sound weapon or something like that was used from an unknown place, which almost caused a stampede.
Afterwards, there was a call for citizens to form their own municipality/town-based meetings called zbors to emulate the plenums. This was somewhat successful in some places, and those zbors would go on to organize their own protests too (though the student protests are always much larger).
Then in May 2025 the students decided to call for parliamentary elections to be held, where the student movement would participate by forming a list of non-student public figures without relation to political parties or public offices which they would ask to represent the student movement in the parliament. They decided against forming election coalitions with anyone and essentially asked the opposition parties to not participate.
In Summer 2025 there was like a week of constant blockades organized by plenums and zbors which saw a lot of police deployments, then a few weeks later there were a few more violent protests which saw some SNS property destruction and police beatings, then a few weeks later professors (who haven't been getting paid for a few months because the government cut their salaries essentially because of the student blockades) and some students started pushing for the ending of blockades. They were successful eventually and all blockades ended, and the whole academic year was then crammed into a few months. The student movement survived, but at a reduced level of activity.
Through out 2025 there were some small local elections that had to happen due to terms ending. They had fucked up schedules because of SNS' prior habit of spamming snap elections so they were only a few small elections at a time. Those ended up being held in a tense environment and followed throughout Serbia, even though nobody would normally care about them. SNS ended up winning all the important ones, but usually by a hair, even though they used to be places they won in a landslide.
So far 2026 has been less eventful than 2025, but the plenums and zbors mostly still exist in some form. The Student list, which the students said at the beginning of May 2025 would be ready in a few weeks, ended up being completed somewhere around the middle of 2026. Though its entire contents are still kept secret.
Now this post is already long as fuck even thought I skipped so many things, so I'll just write something short about the politics of the parties/coalitions which will appear in the elections.
Political programs and such aren't really important in Serbia. Since Vucic came to power in 2012/2014, Serbian politics is basically SNS/Vucic bragging about their dubious accomplishments while the opposition says that SNS/Vucic sucks. The Student list's program is unknown, except for a few tidbits they shared but even that is unknown if it's actually a part of the program because there was some infighting about those announcements (Novi Sad students did it but Belgrade students didn't want to, or something like that). Nobody really cares about SNS' program. One of the lib coalitions is going hard on being pro-EU (but the other one is pro-EU too I think?). SNS is of course also pro-EU (it was founded as a pro-EU offshoot of SRS) but those guys think SNS is not truly pro-EU because they're corrupt and power-hungry while the EU is sunshine and rainbows. Or something like that.
SPS (the Socialist Party of Serbia) is not a socialist party by the way. They're the second most important member of the coalition around SNS. Their popularity is seemingly still based on being Milosevic's party, the exception being when they got a short-lived popularity boost in 2022 which is thought to be because they were seen as more pro-Russian than SNS by SNS voters. By the way, SNS voters are (according to some polls) significantly less pro-EU than the general population, even though SNS is a pro-EU party. They have been falling apart lately, but they will probably manage to pass the 3% threshold.
The funny thing is that both SNS and the Student list are essentially both big tent parties and they both refuse to claim a clear geopolitical affiliation/leaning. While SNS is a pro-EU party, they maintain okay relations with Russia and they seem to have good relations with China, with Xi visiting Vucic and Vucic visiting Xi in the past 2 years. The Student movement does not seem to say anything ever regarding Russia and China, while their relationship with the EU is complicated. Officially they do not claim any leaning towards the EU and infamously EU flags are banned at student protests. However, the academic world is generally much more pro-EU than general population. The would-be Student list voters are also more pro-EU than the general population according to polls. And the Student list candidates are probably mostly pro-EU, due to university professors being very overrepresented on the list. There were also "student actions" involving the EU, the most famous being biking from Serbia to deliver a letter to the EP, but that was never approved by the Great Meeting of Delegates (the highest body of the student movement). However, it was not disavowed either, even though they usually have a policy of publicly disavowing people who claim to represent the student movement without approval.